Tesla deployed 13.7 GWh of storage in Q3 but energy revenue fell 16% year on year

Serguey Asael Shinder26 October 2026, 14:581 min read

Tesla's energy storage business deployed 13.7 GWh in the third quarter of 2026, its second-highest quarterly figure after the 14.2 GWh of Q4 2025, bringing the nine-month total to 36 GWh. Even so, energy-storage revenue fell 16% year on year for the quarter and 6% over nine months. Gross margin in the energy division recovered to 33.1%, up from 31.4% a year earlier and well above the 20.4% it had collapsed to in the second quarter. On the earnings call, Elon Musk said the Megapack system is "almost sold out" for 2027.

Two figures complicate the picture. US government tariff refunds added $786 million to quarterly revenue, of which $339 million flowed to storage customers, and Tesla recorded $729 million in receivables from SpaceX for Megapacks bound for AI data centres.

What it means

Deploying near-record volume while revenue falls is the number to sit with: it means price per gigawatt-hour is dropping faster than Tesla is shipping, which is what a maturing, competitive storage market looks like. The margin rebound from 20.4% to 33.1% is the healthier signal, but the tariff-refund boost and the SpaceX receivable are worth separating out before reading too much into any single quarter — one is a government transfer, the other is intercompany. The durable point is demand: a system that is "almost sold out" a year ahead, with a sister company buying Megapacks to power data centres, says the constraint on grid-scale storage is now manufacturing, not appetite.