In a live stream on a Saturday night, Elon Musk has announced the construction of the first TeraFaban artificial intelligence chip factory for Tesla, xAI and SpaceX. “The next step towards a galactic civilization,” he says.
Gigafactories are no longer enough for Elon Musk’s vision, so he will build the first terafactory at its Tesla campus in Austin, Texas (United States).
The logic of the CEO of SpaceX, xAI and Tesla during the presentation is as basic as it is overwhelming: “Either we build the TeraFabor we won’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’ll build the TeraFab.» The project is going to cost $20 billion. This is the presentation:
What is a TeraFab
Previously, factories were “measured” by the number of units of a product they could manufacture. Elon Musk measures them by the consumption power of the products they manufacture. Its gigafactory produces car components and other products with a power of at least one gigawatt per year, and its new TeraFab will exceed the annual terawattthat is, a thousand times more. It will exceed what entire countries consume in electricity.
These are Elon Musk’s calculations, and we already know his excess of enthusiasm when he talks about figures and dates. Pure fantasy, most of the time. Remember when he said we would land on the Moon in 2024? Well that.
The owner of X estimates that the computing power of AI worldwide is about 20 gigawatts per year. According to him, that figure is 2% of what his companies need. With TeraFab it will manufacture chips for its AI centers with a power of 100 to 200 gigawatts per year. Ten times more than all the AI chips that exist on Earth.
The missing 800 gigawatts will be to power the AI of the million satellites it wants to put into orbit, and SpaceX’s space AI centers.
In this TeraFab, semiconductors, memories, encapsulation, testing and production of lithographic masks. According to Musk, this is not done anywhere in the world. It will speed up chip manufacturing, because the wafers will be manufactured, the chip will be assembled and tested in the same facility.
There will be two types of chips: terrestrial and space. The terrestrial ones will be for cars and humanoid robots Optimus from Tesla and xAI. The space processors, more resistant to withstand the harsh conditions of space, will be for SpaceX’s satellites and AI centers in orbit.
Tesla, xAI and SpaceX’s TeraFab factory is underwaybut at the moment there is no data on when it will start manufacturing chips, and when it will reach that production of one terawatt.