Elon Musk is betting that the next phase of his sprawling technology empire will require a building on a scale that has never existed before. SpaceX and Tesla are building Terafab, a 100-million-square-foot semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, more than five times the size of the world’s largest building.
The accompanying vision is even more ambitious than the building itself. The Terafab website describes the project as a vertically integrated chip factory that will combine logic, memory, and advanced packaging under one roof. Both SpaceX and Tesla will benefit from the facility, which is designed to produce more than 1 terawatt of compute annually.
“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far. And it will be stunningly beautiful,” Musk wrote on X.
With about 18.9 million square feet of floor space, the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, currently holds the record for the world’s largest building. But Terafab is expected to exceed that quickly: “The first phase of the Terafab project represents a capital investment of more than $16.8 billion and will create 3,000 new jobs,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote in a press release.
“We’re now embarking on the most epic chip-building effort—combining logic, memory, and advanced packaging all under one roof,” said Musk in a press release. The project seeks to “close the gap” between the chip production necessary for today and the demand for future production when humanity, according to Musk eventually embarks on space travel.
“Terafab is bringing cutting-edge manufacturing to America, creating thousands of high-paying jobs,” he continued, “and enabling us to produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space.”
Building a future—vertically
Terafab is less of a conventional semiconductor factory rather than an attempt by Musk to build an enormous piece of his own technology supply chain. Both companies expect their combined demand for computing power to eventually exceed 1 terawatt. Terafab will bring chip manufacturing, packaging, and testing into one singular operation. The project aspires to launch a galactic civilization by harnessing “all of the energy on a planet,” echoing Musk’s sci-fi dreams.
Source: fortune