Less than a year after Tesla opened its factory in Texas, the maker of electric vehicles is already plotting an expansion.

A permit application filed June 29 with the City of Austin and approved July 1 shows Austin-based Tesla plans to build a two-floor, 500,000-square-foot space to enlarge its General Assembly 2 and General Assembly 3 operations. Currently, Tesla produces Model Y vehicles at the 2,500-acre site, which is along State Highway 130 near State Highway 71 East.

The 500,000-square-foot expansion, first reported by Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt, would grow the size of the factory by more than 11 percent.

Production at the plant began late last year. In April, Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk hosted an invitation-only grand opening bash at the factory.

The Tesla permit doesn’t indicate how much the expansion will cost. But we can get an idea by looking at how much the factory cost to build.

Paperwork filed last year with the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration identified $1.06 billion in construction expenses for nearly 4.3 million square feet of space. That works out to $247 per square foot. If you apply that figure to the proposed expansion, it would cost nearly $124 million. Of course, that’s a rough estimate, and construction costs have gone up since the existing factory was finished.

The proposed expansion comes as overall production at Tesla’s plants has tapered off. According to the Reuters news service, analysts predict Tesla will report second-quarter deliveries of 295,078 vehicles. That would be below the record-setting total of 310,048 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter.

It’s not known precisely how many vehicles Tesla is producing at the Austin plant, but industry insiders estimate the total ranges from 2,000 to 5,000 vehicles per week. The Electrek blog says Tesla is aiming to manufacture 10,000 vehicles per week there by the end of this year.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

With 66.8 million followers on Twitter, Elon Musk’s tweets attract an outsized amount of attention. So, when Musk tweeted December 16 that the new Tesla factory east of Austin would represent a long-term investment of at least $10 billion, generating over 20,000 direct jobs and 100,000 indirect jobs, it raised more than a few eyebrows.

Until that tweet appeared, Tesla — the Austin-based electric vehicle maker headed by Musk — had indicated it would invest $1.1 billion in the plant and would create at least 5,000 jobs and potentially 10,000 jobs there. As such, was Musk’s December 16 tweet promising far more than that a spot-on statement or a far-fetched embellishment? Musk hasn’t elaborated on his tweet, but experts believe his pronouncement isn’t in the wrong lane.

Corporate site consultant John Boyd doesn’t think the tweet is “hyperbole from larger-than-life Musk,” who is the world’s richest person.

“The magnitude of the Austin campus, the sea change transforming the North American auto industry, and Musk’s extensive business enterprises could easily support those kind of … numbers,” Boyd says. “I have found that the outspoken Musk is not prone to exaggeration and has no problem speaking his mind.”

Moreover, Boyd foresees Musk bulking up the Austin factory site — which is now Tesla’s corporate headquarters — with operations from his other ventures, such as SpaceX and Neuralink.

“Tesla is just a piece of the pie for Musk. Look for him to co-locate some of his other enterprises on his massive Austin site,” Boyd says. “It would be hard for him to find a better labor market and a more favorable state business and tax climate than he now enjoys in Austin.”

Tesla’s production capacity at the Austin plant for its Model Y, Cybertruck, and Semi vehicles could warrant Musk’s new claims about the size of the new factory’s investment and workforce, says Matt Patton, executive vice president of Austin-based economic development consulting firm AngelouEconomics.

“The potential for expanding the factory is there,” Patton says.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.