Tesla raises 2026 capex guidance to over $25B as it bets big on AI and robotics

Tesla just told investors it plans to spend more than $25 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. That number, dropped during the company’s Q1 earnings call, is not a typo. It represents one of the most aggressive investment pivots in the company’s history. For context: Tesla spent roughly $8.53 billion on capex in 2025. The new 2026 target is approaching three times that figure. In the span of a single earnings call, the company also revised a forecast it issued just months earlier. Back in January 2026, Tesla’s own guidance pegged 2026 capex at over $20 billion. The new ceiling is $25 billion, and the word “over” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Where the money is going Tesla’s spending priorities read less like an automaker’s balance sheet and more like a Silicon Valley moonshot fund. The core investment areas are the Cybercab robotaxi program, the Optimus humanoid robot line, and the broader AI and autonomous driving infrastructure that underpins both. Both projects require enormous upfront capital: manufacturing facilities, training compute, sensor development, and the kind of iterative hardware-software testing loops that are notoriously expensive. The free cash flow...