Construction is seen Monday morning north of Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory Texas. CEO Elon Musk said the company and SpaceX are building the world’s largest chip manufacturing plant, but not all there.
Elon Musk says Tesla Inc. and SpaceX are building the world’s largest chip manufacturing plant.
The facility — which he said could be more than 12 times the size of the massive Samsung chip plant in Taylor — would build chips for artificial intelligence and the space data centers Musk has recently begun touting.
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Construction is seen Monday morning north of Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory Texas. CEO Elon Musk said the company and SpaceX are building the world’s largest chip manufacturing plant, but not all there.
Tesla bragged it would the “the largest chip manufacturing facility ever.” It will produce chips to support from 100 to 200 gigawatts a year of computing power on Earth and a terawatt in space, Musk said.
“We’re confident this is feasible. No new physics or impossible things are required to get there,” Musk said during a presentation Saturday. “We’re starting off with an advanced technology fab here in Austin.”
He made several bold claims, including that the site requires thousands of acres and would need more than 10 gigawatts of power at full scale. He also boasted that it will make chips for Tesla to use in its vehicles and Optimus robots and support the production of 160,000 semiconductor wafers a month.
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Musk’s companies, which have a track record of failing to meet his ambitious deadlines, are far from pulling off Terafab. No timeline has been offered and sites are still being surveyed.
Several locations are under consideration — and it won’t all be at Gigafactory Texas.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says the companies, along with SpaceX subsidiary xAI, are building what will be the world’s largest microchip manufacturing plant.
“We couldn’t possibly fit the Terafab on the GigaTexas campus,” Musk wrote later on X. “It will be far bigger than everything else combined there.” One hundred million square feet is the “right order of magnitude,” he added.
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At that size, it would dwarf the massive plant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. began building in 2022 in Williamson County. By 2028, it’s expected to be about 8 million square feet.
Gov. Greg Abbott added to Musk’s fanfare. He thanked him after Saturday’s event, writing on X, “Your vision is powerful and we are proud of all you do in Texas.”
Early job postings indicate at least some of the project will connect to California, the original headquarters state of both companies. The company is hiring for process and integration engineers in Palo Alto, with job descriptions noting the roles will ensure “global alignment across Tesla’s sister fabs” and develop custom semiconductors for Tesla’s current and future platforms.
Current postings show Tesla also is hiring for several roles in Austin that will tackle engineering and supply chain.
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The announcement comes on the heels of Musk announcing SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI and a plan to launch a constellation of 1 million satellites operating as orbital data centers to support rapid growth of AI. Experts have pointed to hurdles with such a plan, though, including a lack of repair crews and collisions from floating debris in an increasingly crowded Earth orbit.
Samsung’s new plant near Taylor is seen in October, By 2028, it’s expected to encompass about 8 million square feet. Elon Musk a new Tesla/SpaceX chip fabrication plant would be 12 times that.
Chipmaking peers have similarly worked on ambitious plans in recent years amid a chip shortage. In Taylor, Samsung’s plant sits on more than 1,000 acres near U.S. 79 and County Road 401. Its plans includes two logic fabs and a research and development facility. In filings, the company has outlined the potential for up to 11 additional chip production facilities in the region in the coming decades.
Musk’s plans, if achieved, would exceed that. He shared a comparison of Terafab to Gigafactory Texas, noting terafab will be “one hell of a building!” Analysts have estimated the project could cost at least $20 billion.
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Musk expressed gratitude for Samsung and other chip suppliers but explained his reasoning for the Terafab project. “We would like them to expand as quickly as they can and we will buy all of their chips. But, he added that there’s a ‘maximum rate at which they’re comfortable expanding.’
“That rate is much less than we would like,” Musk said. “And so, we either build the terafab or we don’t have the chips.”
