According to foreign media reports, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa discussed Tesla’s possibility of building a battery factory in South Africa.
According to foreign media reports, Musk’s dialogue with Lamagasa occurred earlier in 2024, but the news was not disclosed until now.
According to reports, after Musk contacted South Africa President, he sought to let South Africa relax laws and regulations, so that the satellite Internet service star chain (Starlink) operated by its SpaceX company can conduct business in the country.
Star Chain is a service to provide users with broadband access, but it is often strictly supervised by countries around the world. These regulations aim to protect local Internet service providers. Nevertheless, some countries still use the star chain as a means of enriching the Internet access method. In Africa, Star Chain provides services in Nigeria, Ghana and Botswana. According to Musk on the social media platform X, due to surge in demand, in November 2024, Star Chain suspended new user registration services in Africa.
According to South Africa regulations, Star Chain needs at least 30%of blacks to operate in the country. This requirement may allow SpaceX to cooperate with local companies.
So how does Tesla deal with? It is reported that Musk discussed with Tesla’s possibility of building a battery factory in South Africa and as a transaction condition that encouraged South Africa to relax regulations and allows star chains to operate locally.
It is unclear what type of battery will be produced by the “battery factory” discussed by Musk and Lamagosa.
At present, Tesla produces batteries in GigaFactory, the United States, for Cybertruck, but the factory has limited production capacity and Tesla still faces some problems in expanding production capacity.
Tesla is also producing battery packs for its electric vehicles and energy storage business, of which the expansion of energy storage business is far faster than the electric vehicle business. Tesla is building a so -called “MegaFactory” to produce MEGAPACK batteries required to produce energy storage products.
Since 2016, there have been rumors that Tesla plans to build factories in South Africa, but so far the company has not yet made any substantial progress.