Elon Musk announces ‘Terrafab’ project, will produce own AI chips to service Tesla, SpaceX’s lofty space computing goals
According to AFP, Elon Musk announced on Saturday that rocket-building company SpaceX and electric vehicle giant Tesla will jointly operate a new chip production facility in Austin, Texas.
Referring to Musk, he added that the chips will be used in artificial intelligence projects, robotics and space-oriented data centers with the goal of producing 1 terawatt of computing power per year. (1 terawatt = 1 trillion watts).
Why is Elon Musk building his own chip manufacturing facility?
The world’s richest man said the so-called “Terafab” was necessary because demand for computing power from Tesla and SpaceX was expected to far exceed that of global chip suppliers. Although he did not disclose how much the initial investment was made, he noted that reports pegged the initial investment at $20-25 billion.
“We are very grateful to our existing supply chain, Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others… but there is a maximum rate at which they can expand comfortably. That rate is much less than we would like… and we need chips, so we will produce Terafab. The high-tech factory in Austin will have the facilities to design, manufacture, test and refine each chip,” Musk said.
- The other will be a high-power chip designed for space that can be used by SpaceX and xAI. Musk said he expects xAI to use the vast majority of the chips.
- Musk also revealed a speculative rendering of a future “mini” AI data center satellite with 100 kW of power. It’s part of a larger installation that SpaceX wants to build to perform complex calculations in space.
- In January, SpaceX requested a license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch one million data center satellites into orbit around Earth. “We expect future satellites to probably go into the megawatt range,” Musk added.
(With inputs from AFP and Bloomberg)
