'Terafab Will Be 50 Times The Size Of Pentagon': Elon Musk On Tesla & SpaceX's New Semiconductor Facility

· Free Press Journal

Elon Musk has put a striking new number on the scale of Terafab, the semiconductor megaproject he is building jointly through Tesla and SpaceX, saying the completed facility will be 50 times the size of the Pentagon. The comparison, posted alongside a size chart pitting the Grimes County site against Giga Texas, the Pentagon, Apple Park, and the Mall of America, comes as construction formally gets underway on what the companies are calling the largest chip manufacturing facility on the planet.

Where and how big?

Visit esporist.com for more information.

Tesla and SpaceX have confirmed that Terafab will rise in Grimes County, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston, with the finished site spanning more than 100 million square feet. The project builds directly on earlier groundwork in April, the companies broke ground on a research fab on the North Campus of Giga Texas, described as the precursor to Terafab. Musk has separately called Terafab "the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far."

The investment and the jobs

The first phase of construction carries an initial price tag of $16.8 billion, with the companies signalling that future expansion phases could push total investment considerably higher. SpaceX has said the facility will employ at least 3,000 people, and according to Musk, that figure covers only the beginning. "3,000 jobs is just for phase 1 of 10 btw," he said, adding that "the jobs number will be much higher over time. That's just the first year or so." The complex is planned to rise across 3,000 acres, with SpaceX controlling more than 13,000 acres in the surrounding area.

What it will produce?

Terafab is designed to combine every stage of chip production - logic, memory, packaging, and testing - at a single site. The stated target is more than 1 terawatt of computing power annually, intended to close the gap between global chip supply and what Tesla and SpaceX expect to need in the years ahead. Output is earmarked for edge computing and inference chips for hardware like Tesla's Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, along with high-power chips designed to run SpaceX's space-based data centers. Musk has indicated the split leans heavily toward space: about 25 percent of Terafab's AI compute could power Optimus, with 75% allocated to AI spacecraft.

Power, water and state backing

To support the facility, the companies plan to build natural gas-fired power plants and large battery arrays. On water, SpaceX has committed to drawing from the local Gibbons Creek Reservoir instead of local groundwater - a reservoir that previously cooled a coal-fired power plant which shut down in 2018, a detail the companies have flagged given local unease over water use amid the spread of data centres across Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott's office has extended a Texas Enterprise Fund grant of $30 million to SpaceX, with the project qualifying under the state's Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation program. Abbott said in a statement that "Texas is where big ideas grow even bigger."

Read full story at source