Tesla has filed for a $10.1 billion solar cell factory in Fort Bend County, Texas, under the codename “Project Crystal Sun,” according to a tax-incentive application posted by the Texas Comptroller.
The filing pegs the plant at 9,712 permanent jobs, roughly 3,050 acres near Richmond, and commercial production starting in the first quarter of 2029. It’s the largest US manufacturing investment Tesla has ever put on paper.
The application was signed on July 22 by a Tesla tax attorney and prepared by consulting firm Kroll. It’s a request for a 10-year property-tax break under Texas’s JETI program (Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act), routed through Lamar Consolidated ISD. It surfaced publicly on August 6.
The headline number is $10.116 billion: about $1.5 billion in real property and $8.6 billion in equipment. Tesla plans to spend it across three years, 2026 through 2028, then start commercial operations in early 2029.
The equipment list is the interesting part. Tesla is describing a fully vertically integrated plant: ingot manufacturing, wafer manufacturing, coating, metallization and printing lines, cell testing, cleanrooms, the works. That means raw polysilicon in one end and finished cells and modules out the other.
That’s rare in the US. Most domestic “solar manufacturing” is module assembly using cells imported from Asia. Ingot-to-module under one roof is what China does, and it’s what Tesla says it wants to replicate in Texas.
The economic impact statement, written by Kroll, claims the project would add roughly $107 billion to Texas GDP and $6.4 billion in state and local tax revenue over 38 years.
It’s hard to overstate the size of Project Crystal Sun, a 3,050-acre greenfield campus in Fort Bend County, along FM 762 and FM 1994 south of the Brazos River.
The application lists five parcels near Richmond and notes the project would occupy only portions of them, inside a reinvestment zone that Fort Bend County would still have to create. So this is early. There’s a lot of runway between a JETI application and a factory.
Tesla’s whole argument in the filing is that Texas isn’t competitive without the tax break.
The company says it’s evaluating “various locations across multiple U.S. states” and that, without the JETI limitation plus local abatements, the Fort Bend site’s economics are worse than a competing site in another state it won’t name. Property tax, Tesla writes, is one of the largest operating costs for a plant like this. Approve the break, or the investment might go elsewhere.
That’s standard site-selection leverage, and every large manufacturer runs the same play. Tesla is also stacking federal help on top: the filing references the Section 45X advanced manufacturing production credit and Section 48D. The point is that a $10.1 billion sticker price leans heavily on public subsidy to pencil out.
Project Crystal Sun is the manufacturing muscle behind a number Musk has been throwing around all year. The filing cites his statement at Davos in January: the SpaceX and Tesla teams are “working to build to 100 GW a year of solar power in the U.S., of manufactured solar power,” and “that’ll probably take us 3 years or something.”
We’ve been tracking the pieces. In March, Tesla was reportedly in talks to buy $2.9 billion in Chinese solar equipment to feed the US push.
To be clear, Tesla is asking for a tax break and reserving the right to build somewhere else. Companies file these to shop jurisdictions against each other, and plenty never break ground. Treat the $10.1 billion and the 9,712 jobs as a negotiating position, not a commitment.
Second, Tesla has promised big American solar manufacturing before and whiffed. The SolarCity Gigafactory in Buffalo was supposed to churn out 10 GW a year and became one of the company’s most embarrassing boondoggles. The Solar Roof has been on life support for years. Musk’s solar goalposts have a habit of moving.
And yet. If Tesla actually builds a vertically integrated ingot-to-module plant on US soil, that’s genuinely significant. It’s the one part of the current Tesla story that lines up with the original mission the company was founded on, at a moment when its car business is stagnating. Energy is Tesla’s bright spot. A real domestic solar supply chain would matter.
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