Tesla has entered into an agreement to draw on credit of up to potentially $750 million from a group of banks, including Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Credit Suisse, according to a filing on Friday. The initial agreement is for $500 million in loans, but the filing says that if certain conditions are met, loans could be raised to up to $750 million.
The agreement, which is for both Tesla (TSLA) and its Dutch subsidiary (Tesla has an assembly plant in the Netherlands) is in the form of an asset-based, revolving credit facility. The loans — which are secured by their assets and can be borrowed and repaid as need be — are due in five years.
Tesla has a lot of spending it needs to do over the next five years. The company borrowed $2.3 billion in 2014 through a convertible bond offering.
The company plans to spend a whopping $1.5 billion in capex this year, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk called a “staggering amount of money,” in an earnings call earlier this year. Tesla not only has the Gigafactory that it plans to build, but also capital expenditures for the Model X and the Model 3, expansion into international countries like China, and rolling out more fast chargers.
Musk has said the $1.5 billion in capex spending could turn Tesla into a company worth $700 billion in a decade (around the valuation of Apple). But analysts and Wall Street were also concerned in May when the company showed that its cash supply is dwindling.
