A single factory in Grimes County, Texas, is set to cover more ground than the Pentagon, Apple Park and the Mall of America combined. This is Terafab, the chip-making complex Tesla and SpaceX are building together north of Houston. Elon Musk, who runs both companies, calls it the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far. His case for it is that the world’s chip production covers only about 2 percent of what his companies will eventually require.
His answer is a factory sized to match an entire industry. He wants the plant to produce chips totaling 1 terawatt of computing power a year, one number for the output of every chip made there. The global chip industry makes about 20 gigawatts of this kind of capacity a year, which puts his target at around 50 times the whole industry’s output.
That target is why the building has to be enormous, with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space. It is about 10 times the size of Tesla’s nearby Gigafactory Texas plant. The money is on the same scale. The companies have committed nearly $17 billion to the opening phase, which alone ranks among the largest industrial investments either has made. Filings put total spending as high as $119 billion if the full buildout goes ahead. Building at that scale needs outside help. Intel has joined as a manufacturing partner, bringing its 14A chip-making process, which sets how small and efficient each chip turns out.
Each chip is planned for a specific job inside the two companies, and none is meant for outside customers. Some will run Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, and Cybercab, its self-driving taxi. Others are designed for the data centers SpaceX plans to operate in orbit. All of those products depend on chips neither company makes for itself, so both buy from the same limited supply as every other customer in the industry. Terafab is meant to end that dependence by giving the two companies a chip supply of their own.
Construction is only beginning, and no company in the industry has attempted a single chip site this large before, let alone finished one.
