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Tesla and SpaceX said Thursday that \u201cTerafab,\u201d the advanced chip factory they are jointly developing, will be built in Grimes County, Texas, outside Houston, and that they will make an initial investment of $16.8 billion in the project.<\/p>\n
The factory will be \u201cthe largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,\u201d Elon Musk, CEO of both companies, wrote in a post<\/a> on Thursday. More than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned for the facility, according to SpaceX.<\/p>\n The companies say the facility will employ at least 3,000 people from Grimes and nearby Brazos County.<\/p>\n \u201cThe facility will be an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand of the future,\u201d a post on SpaceX\u2019s website reads. <\/p>\n The animus behind Terafab is that Musk\u2019s vision of the future \u2014 one where millions of robots take over human jobs, robotaxis do all the driving, and satellites become data centers for AI training and inference \u2014 requires a phenomenal amount of computing power, far more than what current production rates support.<\/p>\n SpaceX alone has suggested<\/a> in filings that it may spend as much as $119 billion on the project across a \u201cmulti-phase\u201d construction plan \u2014 although the company didn\u2019t talk about Terafab at all on its first earnings call earlier this week. <\/p>\n Intel has said<\/a> it will contribute to the Terafab project, although it\u2019s been cagey<\/a> about its exact contributions. <\/p>\n \u201cTerafab 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,\u201d SpaceX writes on its website. <\/p>\n \u201cBringing 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\u2019s Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, along with high-power chips designed for operating SpaceX\u2019s space-based data centers,\u201d the company wrote. <\/p>\n SpaceX said in its post that it is \u201ccommitting to the use of\u201d water from the local Gibbons Creek Reservoir instead of local groundwater. <\/p>\n The announcement followed a heavily-attended county meeting<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n \u201cWe believe this agreement will strengthen our district, expand opportunities, and better prepare our students for their future,\u201d Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Dr. Sarah Borowicz said in a statement released<\/a> by the Texas Governor\u2019s office. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n