Tesla is cutting 285 workers at its Buffalo factory, the electric vehicle maker said in a filing with state officials Wednesday.
The job cuts amount to 14% of its Buffalo workforce – a figure that exceeds the 10% companywide reduction that Tesla announced on Monday.
The job cuts, disclosed in a filing with the state Labor Department, indicated that 280 jobs will be eliminated at Tesla’s South Park Avenue factory, which it said employed 2,025 people before the cuts started taking place on Monday.
The cuts began on Monday. The company said in its WARN notice filed with the Labor Department that it expects the job cuts to be completed by July 15.
Another five jobs are being eliminated at a site across the street from the Tesla factory that had recently become a gallery for its electric vehicles and a service center for its customers.
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A new report from Tesla, released Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that employment at the company’s Riverbend factory, built and equipped with $950 million in state funds, now has 140 fewer employees than the company said it did in late January 2023.
That site had seven employees before the cuts. It was not immediately clear what the job cuts there would mean for the gallery and service center operation, which would be left with two employees, according to the filing.
Tesla said Monday it was cutting 14,000 jobs among its 140,000-person workforce after its electric vehicle sales slumped during the first quarter and CEO Elon Musk said the company’s costs had grown too much after years of rapid growth.
The job cuts are a setback for state development officials who spent $958 million to build and equip the Buffalo factory, hoping that it would become a center for solar panel production and spawn additional investment and research in solar energy locally, while also attracting other renewable energy component suppliers to the region.
None of that has happened. Tesla has shifted away from production of conventional solar panels, while the solar energy installation business it acquired with its deal to buy SolarCity has shrunk because the company has devoted most of its resources to its electric vehicle and battery production and storage businesses.
The only solar energy products made in Buffalo are its expensive and complex solar roof, which has failed to catch on commercially. Tesla has never said how many solar roofs it produces in Buffalo, but a report last spring from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie said the number was around 3,000 since 2016.
Instead, Tesla has been shifting other types of work to the Buffalo factory to meet its job promise to bring 1,460 jobs to the taxpayer-subsidized facility or face a $41.2 million penalty from the state. The state’s agreement with Tesla did not specify the type of jobs required under the agreement or spell out a salary range for those positions.
As a result, Tesla has hired hundreds of people to work – 675, according to a company statement in February 2023 – on its autonomous driving programs for electric vehicles. Most of those positions are for data annotation work that requires only a high school diploma.
The company also has turned the Buffalo factory into an electronics manufacturing center, producing its electric vehicle Superchargers, which is a growing part of Tesla’s business as it builds out its network of EV charging stations, now numbering about 55,000 globally.
The company began making posts for its fourth-generation Superchargers in Buffalo over the past year. It also began making fully assembled prefabricated Supercharging units, which come with charging stalls mounted on a concrete slab and all electrical components ready to be connected to the power grid, according to the February report to the state. The Buffalo factory also makes charging equipment that allows other makes of electric vehicles to use Tesla’s Supercharger network.
The company also has said it will bring a Tesla-designed Dojo supercomputer to the Buffalo facility as part of a cluster for machine learning that CEO Elon Musk has characterized as a high-risk, high-reward operation that has a significant chance of failure.
Tesla has pledged to invest $500 million over five years on the supercomputer project, including at least $350 million by the end of 2025, and the remaining $150 million by the end of 2029.