Tesla Inc applied for a permit on Wednesday, February 2, to extend its existing Austin-based car factory with a facility to produce cathodes for battery manufacturing, according to Austin City filings and a spokeswoman for the city's development services department.
Tesla submitted an application for a building permit in Austin under the program name "Cathode," with the carmaker listing Colorado River Project LLC as a co-applicant for the project. Tesla has used the "Cathode" name throughout the permitting process for its new factory in Texas on both the state and local levels.
The spokeswoman for Austin's development services department confirmed the exciting news on Thursday, February 3, saying that "this is for the Tesla project and this permit is for a cathode building." She added that the city did not have further details about the project.
Tesla has continued to bolster and enhance its main headquarters in Austin after acquiring over 2,000 acres of land around the Colorado River east of the city back in 2020. Tesla went on to build a giant building in the property named Gigafactory Texas, which is the company's main facility in the area.
Tesla confirmed last month during an earnings call that Giga Texas is now off and running with the production of the Model Y already starting in the factory. The carmaker also installed a battery cell production area to help speed up manufacturing.
That is not enough for Tesla, with the company setting aside 32 acres at their Austin site for Project Cathode. According to a building application obtained by the website Electrek, the applicant for this project is proposing an Industrial Use facility. Michael Loftis of engineering firm Kimley-Horn is named as the applicant for this project, which comes as no surprise given that they were also named as applicants for previous construction permits at the Giga Texas project.
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This project has been a long time coming for Tesla, which has made no secret of its desire to develop and produce its own batteries for the company's electric vehicles. Tesla first announced plans to build its own "cathode facility" back in 2020 during its "Battery Day" presentation.
Drew Baglino, who was Tesla's Senior Vice President of Engineering at that time, said that they were planning on building their own cathode facility in North America. According to Baglino, Tesla will leverage all of the North American resources that exist for nickel and lithium and localize its cathode supply chain and production to reduce the miles traveled by all the materials that end up in the cathode by a massive 80 percent.
Tesla has made good on that promise, securing lithium and nickel supply from North American sources and now building a cathode facility in Austin.
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