Elon Musk’s plans to get into the AI chip manufacturing business are going to be costly. As the New York Times and CNBC report, SpaceX is planning to invest at least $55 billion into its “Terafab” chip plant in Austin, Texas. That’s according to the details of a public hearing notice filed in Grimes County, Texas, for a meeting to request tax breaks for the project.
The company says that if additional phases are constructed, its investment could someday balloon to $119 billion total. When Musk initially announced the project in March, he shared ambitious plans for it to produce enough chips to support up to 200 gigawatts per year of computing power on Earth, and up to one terawatt in space. SpaceX is also trying to expand its data center footprint on Earth, and currently operates a “Colossus” data center in Memphis, Tennessee, that recently signed an agreement to power Anthropic’s AI models.
The Texas plant will be run by SpaceX and Tesla and make chips for both companies, which Musk has said will be used for AI, robotics, and space-based data centers. Last month, Intel announced that it would help design and build Terafab, saying, “Our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale will help accelerate Terafab’s aim to produce 1 TW/year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics.”