As the great pumper event aproaches, let me outline my own speculation, what this is all about.

“@elonmusk: We intend to increase, not reduce battery cell purchases from Panasonic, LG & CATL (possibly other partners too). However, even with our cell suppliers going at maximum speed, we still foresee significant shortages in 2022 & beyond unless we also take action ourselves….”

IMHO, this is typical bullshit speak of our fearless leader. Just for the sake of following argument let assume, that Tesla will make 700k units in 2022. Very unlikely, but so be it. On average, a Model 3/Y will not have more than 60kWh battery. Lets be more generous and assume 70kWh battery pack. 300k of those above will be MiC, maybe 100k will be done in Germany, so the US factories are left with about 300k units. That translates into 21 GWh / year of battery cells. Panasonic installed capacity (as of today) is 35GWh and they were told to extend the capacity.

Obviously, Musk is cooking something up. Taking into consideration recent attacks on Nikola, it is very likely that Tesla is after Semi. Cybertruck is out of question, because what was presented, was badly build prototype, which needs to be redesigned and the competition from electric F-150 will be difficult to cope with. The specification of Semi is still highly guarded secret. We can assume, that based on Daimler eCascadia specification, the battery pack is going to be around 600kWh, it cannot be much more, because it is quite heavy and to charge 600kWh in any reasonable time would require either a diesel generator or quite strong power line. Tesla plans 100k semi/year. Musk is known to exaggerate and the US market will not absorb such high figure anyway, so 10k sounds more realistically. Should this speculation be “close enough”, than the outcome is that Musk does not need new battery OEM in the US and considering how much it would cost to build an “ecosystem” around a Lithium mine, he will not spent those money either. The fix cost of the infrastructure and relatively low production volume will not pay for it.

However, Tesla is expected to make its own batteries. So they will likely buy a line from someone and arrange delivery of raw material, plus they can may a conditional, that they select its own Lithium supplier. Another speculation of mine of course.  

So that it is. Lets see in the afternoon, how close I am :-), cheers.