Elon Musk Is Building the Biggest Building in the World
Tesla and SpaceX confirmed Thursday they will build Terafab, a semiconductor megafactory in Grimes County, Texas, with a first-phase investment of $16.8 billion. Once complete, the complex is planned to exceed 100 million square feet, more than five times the size of China’s New Century Global Center and larger than the Pentagon, Apple Park and Mall of America combined. Elon Musk, who runs both companies, described it as “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.” Intel confirmed it will contribute to the project, though details of its involvement remain undisclosed.
Tesla said both companies need more chips than current and future global production can supply, with a goal of producing over one terawatt of compute annually. The facility will handle logic chips, memory, packaging and testing in a single structure. Chips manufactured there will power Tesla’s Optimus robots and Cybercabs, as well as SpaceX’s planned space-based data centers. The project is expected to create at least 3,000 jobs, with 60 to 80 percent of hires expected to come from Grimes and neighboring Brazos County.
The site sits on the Gibbons Creek Reservoir, formerly used to cool a coal-fired power plant that closed in 2018. SpaceX said it will draw water from the reservoir rather than local groundwater, a decision that addresses ongoing concerns about data center water use across Texas. Hundreds of residents packed a county meeting Wednesday to question millions of dollars in tax incentives and what they called a lack of transparency around the deal. Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office extended a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant to SpaceX, and the project qualifies for additional state incentives.
Total investment across all planned phases could eventually reach $119 billion, though that figure has shifted since Musk first floated the project in March with a $25 billion price tag. A 100-million-square-foot facility would represent the largest single industrial footprint ever built, a scale that reflects both the capital intensity of advanced semiconductor manufacturing and the vertical integration ambitions of Musk’s companies. The announcement adds to a wave of domestic chip factory construction spurred by federal subsidies and supply chain pressure, though Terafab dwarfs other projects in both size and scope.
New York Post
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