Tesla and SpaceX will invest $16.8B to start building ‘Terafab’ chip factory in Texas

“Terafab will be epic in both its mission and in its sheer size, designed to build new compute at an unprecedented scale and speed. A vertically integrated factory with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned. This facility will house the manufacturing, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory devices,” SpaceX writes on its website.

“Bringing these aspects together in one location will enable fast, recursive improvements and accelerate new compute deployed. 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,” the company wrote.

SpaceX said in its post that it is “committing to the use of” water from the local Gibbons Creek Reservoir instead of local groundwater.

The announcement followed a heavily-attended county meeting on Wednesday where hundreds of residents attended and raised concerns about millions of dollars in tax breaks awarded to the project, as well as a lack of transparency.

“We believe this agreement will strengthen our district, expand opportunities, and better prepare our students for their future,” Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Sarah Borowicz said in a statement released by the Texas Governor’s office. “There are defining moments in the life of a school district, and this is one of those moments. Our commitment now is to ensure that every opportunity created through this agreement is managed wisely, transparently, and always with students at the center of every decision.”