Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Tesla, newest first.
With federal self-driving rules still stalled in Congress, cities and states are writing their own, The Verge's Andrew Hawkins reports. Minneapolis is weighing a rule that would require a human monitor in every autonomous vehicle, San Diego's council wants Waymo kept away from its airport, and Austin firefighters want emergency towing and operator-contact rules for Tesla's Cybercab, which has no steering wheel. The pushback is no longer partisan: Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Iowa are among the states considering tighter limits. On October 18, The Verge reported that Philadelphia police had arrested Carolyn Marvin for disorderly conduct after she refused to stop blocking an Uber delivery robot, which she said was taking delivery workers' jobs.
Tesla now sells its driver-assistance software in Europe as Tesla Assisted Driving rather than Full Self-Driving (Supervised). Germany's transport ministry said on October 6 that the old name was "somewhat misleading", because the system steers, brakes and accelerates while the driver stays fully responsible, and that Tesla offered the new name after talks in September. The two sides also agreed the system may exceed the speed limit by up to 10 percent. Transport Minister Steffen Bilger says he will now push for approval across the European Union, where the Netherlands was the first country to approve it earlier this year. TechCrunch notes that Reuters reported on October 7 that Tesla's European campaign rested on flawed safety studies.
One day after Tesla put its first production Cybercabs on Austin streets, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit query covering an estimated 1,000 vehicles, asking what data and process Tesla relied on to self-certify a car that has no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors against safety standards written for cars that do. Tesla says the vehicles comply with every applicable standard and plans to expand gradually. The precedent is not encouraging for speed: a similar probe of Zoox's steering-wheel-free robotaxi took years and ended in a temporary exemption capped at 2,500 vehicles a year.
The two companies confirmed Grimes County, Texas — about an hour northwest of Houston — as the site for Terafab, a plant that would run logic, memory, packaging and testing under one roof rather than splitting them across suppliers. The first phase is $16.8 billion for a facility of more than 100 million square feet and at least 3,000 workers, making chips for Tesla's Optimus robots and Cybercab as well as SpaceX's planned space-based data centers. The caveat is in SpaceX's own filing, which describes the arrangement as a general framework with no binding commitments and no obligation for either side to keep going. No completion date has been given.
Elon Musk imposed a $200-per-week cap on Tesla employees' AI-tool spending, requiring manager sign-off to go over, according to The Information. Notably, the limit exempts his own Grok as well as Anysphere's Cursor, which Musk has pushed staff to use — a pointed carve-out for favored tools. Tesla joins Uber, Meta, Walmart, and Coinbase in reining in runaway AI bills, the latest sign that the "use all the AI you can" era is giving way to hard cost discipline.
Sunrun, Tesla, and Renew Home are pooling hundreds of thousands of home batteries and more than 8 million smart thermostats into a 16-gigawatt virtual power plant aimed at AI data centers — capacity that needs no new land, water, or hardware and can come online in months rather than years. With US data-center demand projected to climb from 41 gigawatts this year to 66 gigawatts in 2027, the Brattle Group estimates better use of the existing grid could cut US power bills by $110 billion to $170 billion over the next decade. About 300 megawatts is already available in Virginia's Data Center Alley, though the headline figure is theoretical rated capacity, not firm supply.
TechCrunch reports xAI is now buying $2.8 billion more unregulated natural-gas turbines to power its Memphis-area data centers, abandoning the *"solar-electric economy"* commitment Elon Musk wrote into Tesla's 2023 Master Plan 3. The pitch for the eventual fix: SpaceX-launched orbital solar arrays that the company claims can deliver more than five-times the energy of terrestrial panels with constant illumination. A SpaceX filing argues *"terawatt-scale annual AI compute growth"* will eventually force data centers off-planet — a long-horizon framing that does not yet address the methane the Memphis turbines burn today.