TERAFAB: Musk aims for "a future among the stars"

TERAFAB is "the next step to becoming a galactic civilization", according to the blurb. And what is TERAFAB? A collaboration among Elon Musk's Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI which is launching "the most epic chip-building effort ever — combining logic, memory and advanced packaging under one roof" — says the website. The US businessman is the driving force behind all three companies across Space, artificial intelligence (AI) and electric vehicles. He founded xAI in 2023 to develop the Grok chatbot; it was acquired earlier this year by private aerospace manufacturer SpaceX - which he founded in 2002 to revolutionise Space technology and enable human life on Mars. The YouTube explainer for this March 2026 TERAFAB campaign has, as you can imagine, sparked mixed reactions, from excitement to cynicism. See what you make of it: "To harness as much power as possible from the Sun, we need to send 100 million tons of solar capture into space – per year. This requires massive scale. – Capability to launch millions of tons of mass into orbit: – Solar-powered AI satellites: – Millions of Tesla Optimus robots to help build it out. All of these need chips: 100-200GW of chips for Optimus alone, plus terawatts for solar-powered AI satellites. That's more than all the chip manufacturers in the world combined can provide today, or even by 2030 (based on projected production growth). We're building TERAFAB to close the gap between today’s chip production & the future's demand – a future among the stars". Musk hit the headlines as the world's first trillionaire earlier this month, but soon lost that paper status - fired by the IPO of SpaceX - as "technology stocks broadly tumbled, fuelled by growing doubts over the long-term profitability of artificial intelligence", reported the BBC. Musk's belief that synthetic and artificial intelligence can and should swiftly outpace human intelligence is not to everyone's taste - as reflected in increased public awareness and discussion of how we want to incorporate such technologies into human life as we know it. TERAFAB's vertically integrated, terawatt-scale semiconductor venture is "being built in Texas across two main locations: a research facility in Austin and a massive full-scale manufacturing complex in Grimes County", says Google AI Overview, quoting Wikipedia. Musk personally moved to Texas in December 2020, relocating the corporate headquarters for Tesla in 2021 and SpaceX / X in 2024, says the same source, quoting the BBC as reporting: "He relocated and shifted his corporate footprint due to a combination of taxation, regulatory friction, and business scaling needs". There is no state income tax in Texas.

Keywords: TERAFAB, Elon Musk 2026, terawatt-scale semiconductor manufacture, AI, galactic vision, synthetic intelligence, solar capture, terawatt chips