Musk Calls Tesla Shanghai “A Gem” in China Media Interview

Elon Musk discussed China’s artificial intelligence progress and Tesla’s operations in the country during a new interview with China Media Group, highlighting the Shanghai factory team and advances in AI development.

Musk credited Tesla’s Shanghai success to its local workforce, saying “To be totally frank, the magic of Tesla Shanghai is because of the Chinese team”. He described the team as “just incredibly talented… hardworking, trustworthy” and said “quality is excellent and efficiency is excellent”.

The Tesla CEO said the Shanghai factory was “a gem” while explaining the importance of the China team behind the facility. His comments came alongside praise for Chinese artificial intelligence models, which he said are “generally outstanding”.

Musk added that China is doing “by far the best in terms of performance per unit of compute” when discussing AI efficiency. He said the country’s current compute limitations could be addressed through improvements in lithography and chipmaking, estimating those constraints could be solved in “about 2 or 3 years”.

The interview also covered Tesla’s robotaxi plans. Musk said Cybercab is already operating commercially in Texas and will soon expand to Arizona, Nevada and several other states. He added that by the middle of next year, the service should be operating commercially in many states.

Musk also discussed xAI’s progress, describing Grok 2.7 as “a solid workhorse of a model”. He acknowledged that it is not currently as capable as Anthropic’s Claude 4.5, which he called a very good model, but said he expects xAI to catch up to the frontier sometime next year. Musk also said xAI’s personal digital assistant is growing about 100 percent a month.

During the conversation, Musk said China passed the United States in electricity generation earlier this year. He also praised the country more broadly, telling the interviewer, “any words I say do not do justice to the incredible majesty that is China.”

Musk said Optimus could reach a scale of at least one billion humanoid robots in less than 10 years as Tesla continues developing robotics alongside its vehicle and AI efforts. The comments add to Tesla’s broader push to combine manufacturing, artificial intelligence and robotics across its operations.