Elon Musk started talking about building his own chip manufacturing facility in late 2025 and officially announced the project in March of this year. The reasoning behind this project is that both SpaceX and Tesla will require at least 1TW of compute, which is more than ten times that current global chip supply.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that a project like this will be an “extremely hard” challenge, but it appears that Musk is willing to put his massive resources on the line for this. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan even said that he can “think of no better partner than Elon Musk” to explore “unconventional” ways of chip manufacturing.
Musk is no stranger to both leading and funding projects that otherwise seemed impossible. Although he did not found Tesla, his investment and leadership in the company led it to become an industry trailblazer in EVs. He fundamentally changed commercial space travel with SpaceX; something that used to be the purview of NASA and other national governments, and he also broke a record when he set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days back in 2024 — a process which Huang said usually takes four years.
It seems that Terafab is Musk’s biggest project to date, which is estimated to require up to $119 billion in investments. But even though it seems that this project already has a secure customer base in SpaceX and Tesla, the former acknowledges that there’s a risk that this ambitious megafactory may not be successful.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Wednesday August 12, @02:26PM (1 child)
That's a two mile by two mile square slab. Around 83 million cubic feet of concrete. It will take 309,000 truck loads. About 1.5 billion dollars worth Mexican labor.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Thursday August 13, @05:07AM
... and be connected via Hyperloop transit, run by Optimus robots, and powered by helium-3 mined from the Mars colony.
I'll believe it when it starts producing hardware.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Wednesday August 12, @11:08PM (4 children)
I wonder if he has considered purchasing an entire country outright. People might agree to a new constitution referendum if they are fed up with their government and every citizen gets $10000 for the purchase. The new constitution would acknowledge that and, dropping classic titles like "president", "prime minister", or "chancellor", make him CEO. He would run it like a corporation, extract any profit to be made, and possibly, after a certain holding period could also sell off the entire country to Jeff Bezos or a small island to Bill Gates, or such.
It is neoliberal lore that private enterprise is (despite extracting profits) always more efficient than the state, so making the entire state a private enterprise should in (their) theory be even more efficient.
I'd be curious how that would play out (after he starts out by making their National Aviation Safety Bureau a division of SpaceX).
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday August 12, @11:22PM (1 child)
Then he'd get sanctioned by MAGA?
Joking aside, not an American here but isn't this, parking aside the probability of success, a good thing for Americans?
but as far as I can tell, this is currently just a thought bubble from the Musky one.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday August 13, @02:47AM
Really, I have no idea how this might turn out and/or if he ever had the idea. I just thought, with a trillion in the bank, there is at least the financial possibility of actually buying an entire country with, like 10 million inhabitants, for $100bn, and he'd still have $900bn in the bank. Maybe, because it's good for launches (polar or equatorial), or as a bank with self-written bank laws, or he wants to build a giant model of his space colony, or to see what governing systems would work for that. I would bet that the country develops fast, he'd even turn a profit, the majority of the people are happier than with the previous government, and the rest of the world complains about what happens to the others. Or so.
Could be stuff for a novel, either without, or with 007, I think Bond has never had a supervillain who did that. Time for fiction to catch up to (theoretical) reality ;)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 13, @02:41AM
I've heard Greenland is available....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Thursday August 13, @12:10PM
He already has. You're witnessing the results.