Instead of shutting down its Chinese FSD project, Tesla suddenly announced it's speeding up hiring for it. On August 26, the company denied reports that its Shanghai data center had been emptied out, that related teams had been pulled, and that positions had been cut. Tesla China didn't stop at a simple denial, either — it reported the claims to the police. The message to First Financial was blunt: the center is running normally, hiring hasn't slowed down, it's accelerating.
But a loud denial isn't the same as a win. It doesn't mean full FSD has actually reached Chinese owners. Tesla itself added China to its list of FSD Supervised markets back on May 21. Ninety-seven days have passed since then — and what's the result? The Chinese configurator for the Model 3 and Model Y still only offers the Tesla Assisted Driving package for 64,000 yuan, with a direct disclaimer that full functionality is coming later. Activating those future capabilities, the company itself warns, depends on further development and regulatory approval.
That's a strange split: the infrastructure isn't being wound down, yet the commercial rollout remains unfinished. Back in February, Tesla brought a local AI training center online to train its driver-assistance systems on Chinese data. In April, CFO Vaibhav Taneja admitted that broader regulatory approval hadn't come through yet, and that the company was hoping to get it in the third quarter of 2026.
There's one more telling detail. On Tesla's current page listing markets where the monthly FSD Supervised subscription is available, China is nowhere to be found. Tesla itself is careful to note that the current system still requires constant driver supervision and doesn't make the car autonomous.
So the real thing to watch for is now pretty clear — and it has nothing to do with headcount in Shanghai. It's whether Tesla actually secures broader approval and finally switches on the full feature for Chinese customers. If that third-quarter target still holds, there's a little over a month left before it runs out.
