GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget.
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Elon Musk announced plans to build a Terafab plant in Austin, Texas, that will be jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX. The goal is to eventually build chips at scale for robotics, artificial intelligence, and space-based data centers for Musk’s various companies.
Musk has expressed concern, as have other executives, about the chip industry’s ability to keep up with demand as the AI industry has boomed. But building a chip fabrication plant is complex, requires billions of dollars, many years, and a ton of specialized equipment. And, as Bloomberg points out, Musk “has no background in semiconductor production and a history of over-promising on goals and timelines.”
According to Bloomberg, Musk said, “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab,” before outlining plans to produce chips that could support up to 200 gigawatts per year of computing power on Earth, and up to a terawatt in space. While Musk gave some details about the scale of the computing power he expected Terafab to produce, he offered no timeline for when it might meet those goals, or even when the facility might come online.