Musk's Terafab: A $25 Billion Bet on Building AI Chips from Scratch
TL;DR Elon Musk just announced Terafab — a joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI semiconductor fab in Austin, Texas, with a price tag of $20–25 billion. The plant aims to produce custom AI inference chips (AI5) and radiation-hardened space processors (D3) at 2nm, targeting one terawatt of annual compute. The ambition is staggering. The execution challenges are even more staggering. TSMC spent 50 years getting where it is, and Tesla has never manufactured a single chip. ...