[sharun]

I never understood why the Gigafactory is viable with China around. Does this have to do with location of the mines?

[Retric]

Labor is a smaller fraction of the costs to produce batteries. Consider they only have 850 workers, so even if moving to China saved 50k per worker it's not actually that valuable vs much better IP protection.

[azernik]

And vs. low shipping costs to Tesla factories and to target markets.

[swsieber]

Probably? Batteries seem relatively dense compared to most products... But there's probably more at play.