After months of speculation, Tesla and SpaceX announced that Grimes County, Texas, will be home to their new advanced chip factory, Terafab.
The advanced facility is crucial to both companies as they seek to secure and control their own microchip production supply chain, which will power Tesla’s Robotaxis and Optimus program, as well as SpaceX’s AI data center ambitions.
In a post, SpaceX noted that:
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,
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.
In local filings, SpaceX suggested it could spend as much as $119 billion on the project, but the initial investment will be $16.8 billion for the proposed 100-million-square-foot facility.
For local residents, the Terafab project has been contentious. For some, the millions in tax breaks being offered to SpaceX and Tesla and the lack of transparency from county officials are worrisome. As is the potential drain on local resources, including water and the local electrical grid.
However, for the county, the creation of 3,000 well-paying jobs in Grimes County and nearby Brazos County seems to have been worth the tax breaks. SpaceX also confirmed in a post that they are committing to using water from the Gibbons Creek Reservoir to avoid issues with the local groundwater, which many rely on for their well water.
Always get the latest - make Drive Tesla your preferred source on Google
Are you buying a Tesla? If you enjoy our content and we helped in your decision, use our referral link to get three months of Full Self-Driving (FSD).Drive Tesla uses affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you make a purchase through them, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support.
