Chris Long, a veteran Tesla supply chain leader, has left the company after nearly a decade.
Long, who most recently served as Director of Datacenter and Electronics Supply Chain, departed last month to rejoin Bloom Energy as Head of Program Management.
His departure, as indicated by a LinkedIn profile update, adds to the steady stream of senior-level exits that have reshaped Tesla‘s leadership over the past two years.
The mode was first reported by Electrek‘s Editor in Chief, Fred Lambert, on X this Monday.
Tesla Career
Long joined Tesla in October 2016 as a Global Supply Manager focused on Power Distribution, managing the sourcing of components that route high-voltage electricity through Tesla‘s vehicles — such as wiring harnesses, busbars, connectors, junction boxes, and related hardware.
Over the following six years, he rose through several supply chain roles in the power distribution vertical.
He was promoted to Senior Global Supply Manager in late 2018, then Group Manager in November 2019, and Senior Group Manager by May 2022.
Long’s trajectory shifted in mid-2023, when he moved from power distribution into electronics, becoming Senior Group Manager of Electronics Supply Chain in August of that year.
Then, by January 2025, he had been elevated to Director of Datacenter and Electronics Supply Chain, a title reflecting Tesla‘s growing investment in the compute infrastructure underpinning its autonomy ambitions.
In that role, Long would have overseen the procurement of GPUs, networking hardware, cooling systems, server racks, and related components at a time when Tesla was aggressively scaling its AI training capacity.
AI Investment
Long’s career arc at Tesla mirrors the company’s own transformation.
When he started in 2016, Tesla was an EV maker scaling Model 3 production.
Now, the company is building semiconductor fabrication research facilities, designing custom AI inference chips, and preparing to begin production of the purpose-built fully autonomous Cybercab and the humanoid robot Optimus.
During the company’s first-quarter earnings call on April 22, CFO Vaibhav Taneja confirmed that capital expenditures would surpass $25 billion this year — up from a prior guidance of $20 billion — with AI compute infrastructure accounting for a significant share of the increase.
According to Tesla‘s latest shareholder update, the company’s Cortex 1 AI training cluster at Gigafactory Texas already exceeded 100,000 H100-equivalent GPUs in production.
A second cluster, Cortex 2, came online in April with over 130,000 H100-equivalent GPUs in early ramp.
Return to Bloom Energy
Long’s move to Bloom Energy is not his first stint at the San Jose-based fuel cell maker.
He previously worked at Bloom Energy for four years and five months between 2010 and 2014, progressing from Inside Sales Specialist to Operations Manager and then Strategic Materials Supply Chain manager.
At Bloom Energy, Long now holds the title of Head of Program Management.
The Broader Exodus
Tesla has lost more than a dozen senior executives over the past two years as it accelerates its shift from traditional vehicle manufacturing toward autonomy and robotics.
Among the most prominent departures are Sendil Palani, a VP of Finance who had been with the company since 2009, and Omead Afshar, a VP of Sales and Manufacturing for North America and Europe.
In the engineering teams, among the exits are Drew Baglino, an 18-year veteran who led powertrain engineering, VP of Hardware Engineering Pete Bannon and VP of Engineering Milan Kovac — who headed the Optimus humanoid robot program.
Victor Nechita, the program manager for the Cybercab, left in February — just days after the first Cybercab production unit rolled off the line at Giga Texas.
The departures span nearly every major function at Tesla, from powertrain and hardware engineering to sales leadership, finance, and now supply chain.
Some executives have cited personal or family reasons, while others have offered no public explanation.
The Autonomy Pivot
The context for these exits is a company that is spending aggressively to pivot toward AI-driven revenue streams.
Tesla reported $22.4 billion in first-quarter revenue, with adjusted earnings per share of $0.41 beating consensus estimates.
Gross margin reached 21.1%, its strongest reading in several quarters.
However, capital expenditures jumped 67% year over year to $2.49 billion, and the updated full-year guidance of over $25 billion represents roughly three times what Tesla spent in 2025.
That spending is flowing into AI training compute, new factories for the Cybercab, Tesla Semi, Megapack 3, and Optimus, as well as a semiconductor fabrication research facility at Giga Texas in partnership with SpaceX.
Tesla completed the final chip design of its next-generation AI5 inference processor in April and is developing the AI6 chip for 2028 production.
Musk acknowledged during the latest earnings call that Robotaxi revenue would not be material in 2026, pushing meaningful contribution into 2027.
He also confirmed that older Tesla vehicles equipped with Hardware 3 computers cannot support unsupervised FSD, effectively capping near-term monetization of the existing fleet.
