Tesla's Giga Texas facility is expanding to house 50,000 Nvidia GPUs for on-site AI compute infrastructure.

Drone footage of Tesla's gigafactory in Texas, shared by Brad Sloan on YouTube and captured in the early hours of Tuesday, reveals the installation of gigantic fans at the facility. These fans are part of the cooling system for the facility's south extension, which is being completed to house 50,000 of Nvidia's GPU chips designed specifically for AI applications, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Giga Texas currently covers 2,500 acres along the Colorado River with over 10 million square feet of factory floor. However, Tesla required additional space to accommodate the Nvidia GPUs, as each GPU demands significant power and cooling resources. The south extension being constructed is custom-built for heavy power computing and features huge cooling towers, Musk explained.

In response to the drone footage, Musk made a wordplay statement on Wednesday, saying, "We would be nothing without our fans." The remark appears to reference both the cooling equipment being installed and the company's substantial fan base.

Beyond this hardware expansion, Tesla's AI ambitions require substantial investment. Musk revealed that Tesla would spend $3 billion to $4 billion this year on hardware purchases from Nvidia, with the majority of its remaining $10 billion AI-related budget allocated for internal use. These internal investments include AI inference computers, the sensors present in its cars, and its Dojo supercomputer.