The chip factory that Elon Musk says will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth has a home. The companies picked Grimes County, Texas, just north of Houston, as the site for Terafab. Thursday’s confirmation put the first construction budget at $16.8 billion.
The facility is planned to cover more than 100 million square feet and will combine manufacturing, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory devices in one place. Output is aimed at Musk’s AI ambitions: chips for edge computing and inference in Tesla’s Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, plus high-power parts for SpaceX’s space-based data centers. SpaceX filings have floated as much as $119 billion for the multi-phase build, though the project went unmentioned on the company’s first earnings call this week. Intel has said it will contribute without detailing its role.
Local reaction is mixed. The news landed a day after a packed Grimes County meeting at which hundreds of residents questioned the millions in tax incentives attached to the project and the secrecy around it. At least 3,000 jobs are promised for Grimes and nearby Brazos County, and SpaceX says it will draw water from Gibbons Creek Reservoir rather than local groundwater.
