Gigafactories: A Word Tesla Made Necessary

In 2013 Tesla borrowed gigafactory to describe a battery plant planned at a scale the world had never built: millions of square feet, tens of GWh of cells per year, thousands of jobs. Gigafactory Nevada broke ground in 2014 and partners like Panasonic fill it with battery lines today.

Shanghai followed in 2019, built from mud to finished cars in under a year. Now the word applies to any vast plant for cells, chips, or vehicles, and governments compete for them as once they did for steel mills.

The gigafactory is the factory story of the current century so far..