The launch of the Tesla Supercharger for Business calculator brings unprecedented transparency to the DC fast-charging market. It provides a rough estimate of charging station costs and simulates return on investment.

Moreover, having the default data enables us to estimate the cost of building the entire Tesla Supercharging network from scratch.

$10 Billion

Globally, the Tesla Supercharging network recently hit a milestone of 80,000 individual stalls at over 8,500 sites. Of those, roughly 37,000 stalls are in the US, and nearly 3,000 are in Canada.

A standard 8-stall station (one V4 cabinet and eight dispensers) in the US costs about $500,000, plus another $440,000 for a Medium installation (8 x $55,000). The total default cost would be $940,000 (the final amount varies by site). Let’s assume a round $1 million per site for simplicity.

Assuming an order of 10,000 8-stall V4 systems, one could build 80,000 stalls across thousands of locations, effectively recreating the entire Supercharging network for a “mere” $10 billion. The cost of the infrastructure would be $5 billion if we limit it to the US and Canada.

$10 billion is a large sum, but not that big for the automotive industry. One could even say that it’s a relatively small amount for the advantage it gave to Tesla. It was a necessity, on the one hand, to offer EVs with long-distance travel capability, and a powerful tool on the other hand.

The Supercharger’s power was so high that it ultimately defeated the CCS1 charging standard in the US (it will probably do so in Japan and South Korea as well).

Old vs. New Stalls

There were multiple Supercharger versions between 2012 and 2026 (plus market-specific versions). Additionally, infrastructure costs vary across countries. Thus, it’s impossible to get a more accurate estimate of the cost Tesla spent on the network.

We guess that the new 500-kW V4 Superchargers might be cost-competitive with the initial 120-kW Superchargers, despite a 4x increase in peak power and support high-voltage battery systems (up to 1,000 volts). The increased production scale and improvements made over the years suggest that the new stalls are cheaper than the old ones.

Network Maintenance: $2 Million/Day

In the Tesla Supercharger for Business calculator, Tesla uses a flat, all-inclusive $0.10/kWh fee for a full-service package (maintenance and everything required to run the service).

We know that Tesla’s global average daily throughput per stall is roughly 250 kWh. This is in line with a separate input from Max de Zegher, Tesla’s Director of Charging North America, who wrote that the network delivers 20 GWh of energy per day (250 kWh at 80,000 stalls).

Combining the $0.10/kWh fee with 250 kWh/day/stall usage, we can note that a single dispenser would cost $25 per day. That’s what Tesla asks, but even if one builds the network with different chargers and one’s own system, the total costs would probably average out to something similar, we guess.

At 80,000 stalls, the daily cost would be $2 million ($730 million annually). Half of that ($1 million/day) falls on the US and Canada alone.

Interestingly, the annual all-inclusive cost is roughly 8% of the cost of building the infrastructure. In 10 years, the total fee would be comparable to the cost of building the infrastructure. It would suggest that the total cost of ownership over about 20 years would be three times the initial order (chargers and installation), maybe even higher as throughput increases over time (Tesla assumes 7% year-over-year).