SpaceX and Tesla Terafab Will Be Largest Building on Planet - $119 Billion Weiner Measuring Contest

Kind: captions Language: en The one thing I do have to say about this time period in the technology industry is if nothing else it makes me giggle. It puts a smile on my face. To be clear, for all of the wrong reasons, but it does put a smile on my face because it is so abjectly stupid, right? So we have SpaceX right now. SpaceX and Tesla are humming together in order to create their Terafab. And apparently their Terafab is going to be the largest building in the world, supposedly. Um that is going to be five times the size of the current largest building in the world. Because of course, because of course. Who Who is just going to build a a normal fab that can actually produce uh enough resources to supply market demand when you can create the largest building in the world? Um so yeah, this is uh the Terafab. So this coming from Tom's Hardware, also everybody else at this point in time. Musk's Terafab uh projected to be larger than the Pentagon, Apple Park, Mall of America, and Giga Texas combined. All in one chip manufacturing facility visualized to show the project's massive footprint. It will form the biggest interior structure on Earth by a massive margin. Uh so there is a uh there's a tweet out there on Twitter or X, whatever the [ __ ] you call it nowadays. And uh basically this is uh showing the size of Terafab. So this weird bone, we're going to call it a bone. This bone-shaped building is what the Terafab is going to be at a hundred million plus square feet. And then they kind of show you the dimensions of other things. Giga, the Gigafactory in Texas is 10 million square feet. That's about the size of it. Pentagon is 6.6 million. Apple Park is 2.82 million and Mall of America is 5.6 million. So, you can kind if you've ever been to any of these buildings, which are absolutely massive, it kind of starts to give you the idea of the scale that Terafab is going to be. Uh the site will reportedly have a floor space of at least 100 million square feet, making it larger than Giga Texas, the Pentagon, Apple Park, and Mall of America combined. It also makes it significantly larger than New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, which has an interior space of just 18.9 million square feet. While this might seem like an absurd amount of space for chip manufacturing, it appears that Terafab will need it because it's going to be more than just a chip fab making AI processors. Instead, it will be an all-in-one facility that will produce logic and memory chips as well as as have lithography, packaging, and testing under one roof. Um so, that would actually be a good thing. One of the things I've argued in the United States is we just don't the verticals for our industry are all screwed up. Like, if you look at manufacturing in China, one of the big things that they do there is they just put everything really close together. So, you have a cabling company near the near the networking company, near all that other stuff. So, they can all manufacture relatively easily, put something on a truck here, ship it one block away to the next factory, and that actually creates a pretty good process. Uh that's been one of the concerns with TSMC. I don't know where we're standing right now. Uh but, one of the big things TSMC was at least originally talking about is that they were going to create the wafers uh for AI chips here in the United States, right? Winner. Right? We We are reassuring AI hardware production to the United States. The issue is, cuz there's always an issue, is that the wafers aren't actually the product. The wafer is just a component to the product. And at least the idea before was that TSMC, I [ __ ] you not, was literally then going to ship the wafers back to Taiwan for what is called the packaging process. The packaging process is when everything gets diced up and actually turned into what you consider a GPU or whatever else, so that can be put into a different component. So, even though TSMC was making the wafers here, there there is a real question about about what that actually meant at the end of the day for self-sufficiency as far as the United States is concerned. If that product has to be shipped all the way to Taiwan to be turned into the finished product, then we're not actually any more self-sufficient than we were the day before. So, it actually is good. Like he hearing that with a Terafab, everything theoretically is going to be under one roof, that actually would be great for manufacturing in the United States. But, lordy, this is big. >> [snorts] >> Lordy. It's just huge. It's just so big. You're like, what why why why Elon Musk, why do you always have to go to this level? Hey, hey Elon Musk, here here's a thing for you here the question for you. Why don't why don't you just give us the Roadster first? How about how about before you build the largest building in the world by far, you you you you you actually ship the Roadsters you took deposits for? Or I don't know, maybe maybe got the the semi trucks on the road or oh or a cyber cabs or cyber What what if cyber cabs actually had more than like Actually no, the cyber cab it's I'm sorry, the cyber cabs aren't actually on the road. Model Y's aren't on the road. What if you actually had the cyber cabs on the road? Hey Elon Musk, what what if you actually finished all of these projects you've been creating over the past decade and once you got those finished, you moved on to the next thing. But again, that's that's not how Elon Musk works. Remember, when you invest in Elon Musk company, you are not investing in the now, you are investing in the future. Anyways, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that a project like this will be a quote an extremely hard challenge, but it appears that Musk is willing to put his massive resources on the line for this. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan even said that he can quote think of no better partner than Elon Musk to explore unconventional ways of chip manufacturing. Well, yeah. I mean, of course Elon Musk is going to be a great partner. He is going to throw a tremendous amount of money and resources to see if this [ __ ] works. And then Intel can sit back and see if this [ __ ] works. You're like, "Wow. Wow, that failed miserably. Let's not do that." Or hey, that worked out well. Let's copy him. So yeah, it does make sense that that Intel would say, "Hey, there's there's no There I would not want to waste somebody else's money with anybody else. Wasting Elon Musk's money is just is a type of waste that you really just can't quantify. Uh let's see here. It seems that Terafab is Musk's biggest project to date, which is estimated to require up to $119 billion in investments. Uh but even though it seems that this project already has a secure customer base in SpaceX and Tesla, the former acknowledges uh that there's a risk that this ambitious megafactory may not be successful. And that's one of my big questions with this. So there's this whole idea, right? So the whole idea with the Terafab is this is going to produce enough chips for for Tesla, for the for the Optimus robots, for the uh for the cybercabs, and for all the stuff that SpaceX wants to do. One of the problems that you get to with this is not none of the none of those products has been validated. They're not selling Optimuses or yeah, Optimuses. There's not a line around the corner for Optimuses. Cybercabs aren't on the road. And again, with the cybercabs, it's a competitive environment, right? You you go to Atlanta, you go to Austin, you go to Miami. I think Miami, right? And you're tripping over Waymos, right? When I went to Austin, I was tripping over Waymos. I never saw a cyber cab. I just did it, right? The The first time I saw a cyber cab was at AI 4 conference last week, and it it was sitting there on the cement. I can say one exists. Can they drive? I have no idea. I haven't seen one drive, right? And so, the interesting thing with the whole Terrafab deal is the idea is that the the market demand for these other products is going to be so massive that is going to require this huge factory in order to supply that demand. And I just have some real questions with that. I mean, does that Again, does that make sense? I don't I don't I don't I don't know. I don't think it does. But who knows? Who knows? I don't have enough money to build a 100 million square foot facility. So, what do you think about this? What do you think about Terrafab? What do you think about the fact that it's just multiples in size of anything else on the planet? Does this Does this make sense? Does this seem Does it seem like a valid like a realistic target to go after, or does it seem that Elon Musk is continuously getting ever further over his skis? Right? You know, you get to you know, cyber cabs Again, remember in 2020, right? It Teslas. I own a Tesla. Tesla is supposed to be an appreciating asset. The value of the Tesla is supposed to go up every year because robo the robo taxi technology is going going to make it a something that I can rent out to other people. Right? He said that for 2020. That still That still doesn't exist. Cyber cabs still don't really exist. Right? The Optimus robot. And look, I've seen one bolted to a frame. I guess they exist, right? Apparently, hands are hard. So, okay, it's not going to be full self-driving, but going to be these robots. And then the robots aren't working out. All right, so it's going to be a data AI data centers in space. But that just looks ever more ridiculous the more you think about it. So, now he's going to be building this huge Terafact, right? It seems like It seems like he has to just create more and more and bigger and bigger absurd promises and visions as more and more of his previous promises seem to get forgotten about. So, I don't know. What do you think about this? Put your thoughts down below. If you like these episodes, do remember they're on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. Link is down below. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, there's a link down there, too. With that, see y'all later.