Tesla Wants a Second Giga Berlin Hall More Than Twice the Size of the First

Image: Michael Wolf / Wikimedia Commons

Tesla is planning a second production hall at Giga Berlin that would be more than twice the size of the one it already runs, according to a Tesla statement and details first reported by German public broadcaster rbb. The new building would sit north of the current plant in Grünheide and cover about 536,000 square meters, compared with roughly 219,000 square meters for the existing hall.

According to rbb‘s report, Tesla wants to file the partial permit application for the northern building in December, with construction starting in 2027 at the earliest. The package also includes a dedicated substation and an expanded wastewater treatment setup, and the whole buildout is expected to stretch over roughly ten years as the site works toward as many as one million vehicles a year. MOZ also reported on the plans on Wednesday.

Tesla told rbb the hall is not a new idea. The company said it outlined the staged expansion of Giga Berlin in its 2023 partial permit application, including the environmental impact, and that the approval notice issued on October 15, 2024 established that the expansion can be permitted in principle. The December filing builds on that decision and would allow the northern building to actually go up once it is approved.

Water has been the most sensitive issue in Grünheide since the factory was first proposed, because the plant sits partly in a drinking water protection area. Tesla now plans an additional water loop with its own wastewater treatment that would eventually handle sanitary wastewater too, so that a bigger plant with more workers would not send extra sanitary wastewater to the local utility. Tesla invited local mayors and utility officials to the plant to walk them through the plan, which matters given the history here.

That history includes the long string of early-start approvals that let Tesla build the first hall before its final permit arrived in 2022, along with years of protests from environmental groups. In February 2024, Grünheide residents rejected the original expansion plan, which would have cleared about 100 hectares of forest, in a non-binding vote, and environmental activists set up a protest camp in the woods near the plant. In May 2024 the local council approved a revised plan that cut the clearing to about 47 hectares. Earlier plans talked about as many as 42,000 workers at the site in the long run, though Tesla has not given a new headcount for this phase.

The hall also follows a steady run of investment at the plant. Tesla has already laid out a battery cell expansion for Grünheide, and earlier this year it committed about $250 million to ramp up battery production at the site. Giga Berlin currently builds the Model Y for Europe and other markets.

Do you think Giga Berlin will ever reach a million cars a year?