Autobidder

Autobidder is Tesla's self-driving energy-trading software. It connects to fleets of Powerwall, Powerpack, and Megapack batteries and decides, second by second, when each one should charge, when it should discharge, and what price to ask for the electricity it sends back to the grid. In Tesla's own 2020 words, it is "a real-time trading and control platform that provides value-based asset management and portfolio optimization."

What is Autobidder?

Autobidder is the virtual power plant layer, the software that pools many batteries and runs them as one player in the market. The hardware stores the energy, and Autobidder turns that stored energy into bids inside live electricity markets, much the way a fund manager puts idle cash to work, except here the asset is megawatt-hours and the decisions happen faster than any person could ever place them. It is part of Tesla's wider Autonomous Control suite, alongside the Opticaster forecasting tool and Virtual Machine Mode, which supplies the grid-steadying inertia that keeps power flowing smoothly.

Why Autobidder Exists

A grid-scale battery only makes money if it constantly buys low, sells high, and offers grid services in real time across many fast-moving markets at once. That job moves too fast for a human trading desk. The need became real with the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia, which Tesla finished building in November 2017 and which began supplying the grid on December 1, 2017. Tesla needed software to bid a giant battery into the Australian electricity market on its own, so it built one.

When Hornsdale's owner, Neoen, expanded the site with Tesla in 2020, adding about half again as much storage, the same software took on the larger battery and kept dispatching all of it. The trading engine built for one battery in rural South Australia became a product Tesla now offers around the world.

How it Works

Autobidder runs machine-learning software that predicts prices, tracks how full each battery is, and places bids with no one touching a keyboard. It works the price gaps in the energy market plus the Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) markets, which pay batteries to steady the grid's frequency: 8 markets when Hornsdale opened, and 10 since Australia added very fast markets in October 2023. It runs on Tesla's cloud and talks to market operators and grid networks through secure web connections.

Frequency control is where most of the money has been. In 2018, its first full year, Hornsdale earned about A$29 million, most of it from frequency-control markets, because a battery can answer a frequency wobble in a fraction of a second and those markets pay for speed. Each Megapack generation also holds more energy, which gives the software more to trade for every unit installed.

The Economics of Autobidder

Autobidder runs on top of Megapack hardware and makes it pay off better. A battery worked across the energy and frequency markets earns more than the same battery left idle as backup, and that difference is what turns expensive storage into an asset worth buying. At Hornsdale, the extra competition also pushed grid-service prices down for South Australian consumers while it paid the battery owner. For Tesla, software that raises a battery's earnings makes each Megapack easier to sell.

Current Status of Autobidder

Autobidder works across a fleet that keeps growing. Tesla's storage deployments set back-to-back records of 12.5 and 14.2 gigawatt-hours in the third and fourth quarters of 2025. In 2026 they were 8.8 in the first quarter, 13.5 in the second, and 13.7 in the third.

More Megapacks installed each quarter means more megawatt-hours the software can turn into money. Hornsdale, now 150 megawatts and 194 megawatt-hours, still runs on Tesla software nearly nine years after it opened.

What Comes Next

Tesla deployed a record 46.7 gigawatt-hours of storage in 2025, and a third Megafactory, in Brookshire, Texas, began building Megapack 3 units of about 5 megawatt-hours each on August 6, 2026. Every new battery is a candidate for Autobidder. Megablock, unveiled in September 2025, ships four Megapack 3 units with their transformer and switchgear, and Tesla says it cuts installation time by 23 percent, which shortens the path from delivery to bids in the market.

The Bottom Line

Autobidder turns a battery from backup equipment into an asset that earns money in power markets. Tesla does not report what the software earns, so its reach is best measured by the storage it can trade, and Tesla's yearly deployments grew every year from 2016 through 2025.