SpaceX and Tesla plan 100M-square-foot chip plant in Texas

Elon Musk’s two flagship companies are building a semiconductor factory so large it makes every other building on Earth look like a studio apartment. SpaceX and Tesla announced plans for a joint chip manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, spanning over 100 million square feet. The project, dubbed Terafab, carries an initial price tag of $16.8 billion, with a potential full buildout cost ballooning to $119 billion. A factory that redefines scale The plant will focus on producing AI-optimized logic and memory chips designed for Tesla’s autonomous vehicle ambitions, its Optimus humanoid robots, Cybercab robotaxis, and SpaceX’s space-centric data operations. The production target is approximately 1 terawatt of compute capacity annually. Texas Governor Greg Abbott threw his support behind the project, which secured local governmental approval for tax incentives. The facility is expected to generate at least 3,000 jobs in the region. Why vertical integration matters here Tesla already designs its own inference chips for Full Self-Driving hardware, and its Dojo supercomputer project represented an early attempt at building custom AI training silicon. But manufacturing those desig...