MUSK IS BUILDING THE BIGGEST FACTORY ON EARTH

Kind: captions Language: en So, picture a factory so big [music] that neighborhoods could fit inside it. 100 million square ft [music] under one roof. Elon Musk calls it the largest, most valuable building on Earth. Its [music] name, Terraab, and it's rising out of the Texas plains in Grimes County, north of Houston. Now, this isn't a car plant. Terrafab is a [music] semiconductor mega factory built to print the tiny brains everything Musk owns now runs on. [music] Tesla and SpaceX made it official in August. Phase 1 alone, $16.8 billion. [music] Why build it himself? M says the world's chip suppliers can't keep up. Even TSMC, which [music] makes most of the planet's advanced chips, can't produce enough for what he's planning in his telling. So instead of waiting in line, [music] he's building his own supply because the shopping list is enormous. Tesla's [music] driver assistance systems think on these chips. The cyber cab robo taxi fleet will run on them. Every vehicle [music] generation needs more computing than the last and millions of vehicles are coming. Then there are the robots. Optimus, [music] Tesla's humanoid machine, needs a brain built at a scale nobody's attempted. [music] And XAI, his artificial intelligence company, is hungry beyond belief. Every model it trains, eats more computing power than the one before. And then the plan leaves Earth. SpaceX wants data centers in orbit and a constellation of AI satellites circling the [music] planet. Add it all up and must target is more than 1 terowatt of computing capacity every year. Here's the [music] twist. Intel is in the confirmed technology partner bringing its cuttingedge 14A process know-how but TSMC running the place. [music] Musk shut that down in October. Tesla and SpaceX will build it and run it themselves. [music] TSMC might sub lease a part. Nothing more. The [music] cleverest part might be the smallest. Near Giga Texas, a pilot fab is going up. a place where engineers can design a chip, make it, [music] test it, and repackage it under one roof. The goal is about 10 designs a year. [music] A major chip normally takes 2 years, drawing to production. The money, matches, the building. Texas tax filings suggest the buildout could reach 119 billion over four phases with at least 3,000 jobs across Grimes and Brazos counties. Early production is targeted for 2027. Mass [music] production 2028. Musk claims his AI5 chip delivers two to three times [music] Nvidia's performance per watt at a tenth of the cost. Those are his projections, not proven [music] benchmarks. And he's never run a chip factory. He jokes he has no idea how to make chips, [music] but they'll figure it out. Maybe they will. If Terraab works, it redraws the chip map. If it doesn't, that's an [music] expensive Texas lesson.