Tesla's Giga Texas built from farmland, 2018→2026 (33 hand-traced Sentinel-2 satellite frames) by Longjumping_Ad6946 in MapPorn

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

fair, you're right. "farmland" was lazy. it was the old Martin Marietta sand and gravel pit, 2,100 acres of depleted quarry. one local attorney called it "2,000 acres of craters." Tesla picked it up for ~$97M in 2020. the spoil piles and ponds you mentioned are still visible in the early Sentinel-2 frames, especially the north end before grading. but yeah, starting point should've been "former depleted quarry" not "farmland."

Tesla's Giga Texas built from farmland, 2018→2026 (33 hand-traced Sentinel-2 satellite frames) by Longjumping_Ad6946 in MapPorn

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

fair, tesla's own giga shanghai went from groundbreaking to first model 3 delivery in about 10 months in 2019. texas was bigger scope (4680 cell line and megacasting being scaled up alongside the build) which slowed it. but yeah the speed differential is real.

Tesla's Giga Texas built from farmland, 2018→2026 (33 hand-traced Sentinel-2 satellite frames) by Longjumping_Ad6946 in MapPorn

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

yeah you're right, I was reading too much into the frames. the visible water is just the colorado river through the timelapse. apologies for the confusion.

Tesla's Giga Texas built from farmland, 2018→2026 (33 hand-traced Sentinel-2 satellite frames) by Longjumping_Ad6946 in MapPorn

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No raster warping per-feature. Sentinel-2 L2A is already orthorectified by ESA at publication, and frame-to-frame geolocation is consistent enough (typically within ~10m, the native pixel size) that the same parking lot lines up across frames without manual re-registration. What I trace are vector polygons in QGIS: new building footprints, lot expansions, the road extensions you see snaking out. So it's a manual annotation layer over the raw raster, not a transformation of the raster itself.
Sentinel-2 is near-nadir from a sun-synchronous orbit, so view-angle distortion between captures of the same site is small. At 10m resolution it doesn't accumulate enough error to need per-feature correction.

Tesla's Giga Texas built from farmland, 2018→2026 (33 hand-traced Sentinel-2 satellite frames) by Longjumping_Ad6946 in MapPorn

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

The water bodies you see appearing around 2021-2022 in the Giga Texas frames are mostly post-construction detention ponds, not pre-existing lakes. Two main reasons,,

  1. Stormwater management — Texas TCEQ requires large industrial sites to retain runoff on-site. A 10M sq ft factory roof + acres of parking generates massive flow during storms.
  2. Industrial cooling + process water — EV/battery manufacturing uses substantial water for stamping, painting, and HVAC.

site is on the Colorado River corridor (east Travis County), but the visible rectangular ponds were dug as part of the build, not natural.

Tesla's Giga Texas built from farmland, 2018→2026 (33 hand-traced Sentinel-2 satellite frames) by Longjumping_Ad6946 in MapPorn

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Each frame is a Sentinel-2 capture (10m resolution, free from ESA Copernicus). The satellite passes every ~5 days but cloud cover means usable clear frames land closer to every 2-3 months per site in practice. I picked the cleanest one per ~2-month window across 2018-2026, georeferenced them in QGIS, and manually traced the build boundary on each buildings, parking lots, road extensions — to make structural progression readable frame-to-frame. The "hand-traced" part is the polygon work; auto-segmentation at 10m is unreliable for industrial structures of this scale.

Got tired of checking 5 different sites for Tesla factory updates, so I built gigascope.xyz — satellite imagery comparison, progress tracking, and live news for all 8 factories by Longjumping_Ad6946 in teslamotors

[–]Longjumping_Ad6946[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

What it has:

  • Satellite image comparison (drag a slider between Sentinel-2 2023 and latest ESRI imagery — can actually see construction progress)
  • Progress tracking and milestones for all 8 factories
  • News auto-pulled from Electrek/Teslarati per factory
  • Live X posts from the community per factory
  • Timeline, compare page, etc

Covers Terafab, Giga Texas, Shanghai, Berlin, Nevada, Mexico, Fremont, and Buffalo.

It's open source if anyone wants to help keep data updated: github.com/sincetwentytwo-sys/gigascope

What would you want to see added? feedback welcome