SpaceX, Tesla to initially spend $16.8 billion on Texas chip plant
Terafab, a vertically integrated semiconductor fabrication plant in Grimes County, Texas, with over 100 million square feet of manufacturing space, will employ at least 3,000 people.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla will initially invest USD 16.8 billion to build Terafab, a vertically integrated semiconductor fabrication plant, in Grimes County, Texas, SpaceX announced.
This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County.
A factory with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space, the facility is expected to house the manufacturing, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory devices. Bringing these aspects together in one location will enable fast, recursive improvements and accelerate new compute deployed, the company said.
“Terafab will produce chips optimized for edge computing and inference for use in hardware like Tesla’s Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, along with high-power chips designed for operating SpaceX’s space-based data centers,” SpaceX said.
“The Terafab is bringing cutting-edge manufacturing to America, creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the Lone Star State, and enabling us to produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said.
The combined SpaceX and Tesla demand for chips is expected to be in excess of 1 terawatt (TW) of compute, which is significantly larger than the current global supply, SpaceX said, adding that its chip suppliers would have to expand production to meet the demand.
“The first-of-its-kind Terafab facility will accelerate chip production in Texas at an unprecedented scale, create thousands of good-paying jobs in Grimes County, and expand economic opportunity for generations of Texans across Southeast Texas and beyond,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott in a press release.
