Tesla has quietly begun recruiting engineers and scientists to execute one of Elon Musk’s most ambitious non-automotive plans: to scale the company into the biggest maker of solar modules in the United States. Senior managers in Tesla’s solar organisation have posted job adverts on LinkedIn this week, seeking “bold, ambitious” staff to solve hard manufacturing problems at speed as the firm pursues a 100GW deployment target that Musk set out in January.
The hiring drive is being led publicly by Seth Winger, a senior manager for solar products engineering, and is echoed by posts from Ralf Gomm, an engineering director, and Bonnie Eggleston, the vice-president responsible for battery manufacturing. Tesla’s recruiting notices set an internal deadline for the 100GW objective of the end of 2028, but they do not disclose where the new capacity would be built.
The timing is telling. With electric-vehicle sales softening, Tesla is placing greater weight on energy generation and storage as a growth vector. Musk has repeatedly argued that expansive data-centre demand driven by artificial intelligence makes utility-scale solar plus batteries the most viable way to add vast amounts of electricity to grids, and he has even floated far-fetched ideas—such as deploying panels in orbit—to link Tesla’s ambitions with SpaceX.
Practical hurdles are immediate. The Solar Energy Industries Association reckons the U.S. has roughly 65GW of installed solar module capacity but only about 3.2GW of domestic cell production. Cells—the photovoltaic wafers that sit beneath glass in finished panels—are the chokepoint: they are capital‑intensive to make and currently dominated by Chinese manufacturers that lead the supply chain on cost and scale.
Tesla has already shown intent to build capacity. Last week the company unveiled a new solar cell at its Buffalo, New York plant—the factory SolarCity sold to Tesla in 2016—but past promises have often outpaced delivery. The Buffalo facility was supposed to be driven up to 1GW of output after Tesla’s takeover and with Panasonic as a partner; Panasonic pulled out in 2020 and the broader ramp has been halting.
The broader industrial backdrop complicates any U.S. revival. Clean‑energy manufacturing saw a surge of announced projects under the Biden administration, helped by tax incentives, but many plants never reached planned volumes and struggled to match cheaper Asian imports. A return to an administration hostile to clean‑energy subsidies would make scaling domestic cell production politically and economically tougher. That risk is acute given tensions between Musk’s public views and those of President Trump, who has called renewables inefficient and backed cuts to subsidies.
There is also a pattern to Musk’s proclamations that analyst Jeff Osborne of TD Cowen highlighted: his long‑range direction is often prescient, but his promised timetables for new manufacturing businesses are frequently unmet. Tesla’s recent hires and product announcements indicate seriousness, but turning a recruiting push into 100GW of delivered U.S. capacity by 2028 would require rapid capital investment, supply‑chain development and supportive policy over the coming years.
For China, Tesla’s outreach so far looks pragmatic rather than adversarial. Reports say Musk’s team has visited Chinese photovoltaic firms such as TCL Zhonghuan and Jingsheng Mechatronics, signalling an interest in technology transfer, supply relationships or benchmarking. That approach underlines how difficult it remains to re‑create the vertically integrated, low‑cost ecosystem that Chinese firms built over the past decade.
In short, Tesla’s hiring spree is a concrete sign that the company intends to make a serious push into solar manufacturing. It also exposes the biggest barriers to America reshoring clean‑energy supply chains: the technical difficulty and cost of cell manufacture, the entrenched advantage of Chinese producers, and the political volatility that could undermine long‑term subsidy-driven projects. Whether Tesla can translate ambition into a large, domestic solar industry will be one of the clearest tests of industrial policy, corporate engineering and Musk’s capacity to manage another manufacturing ramp at scale.