Musk's $119 Billion Chip Plant: ASML CEO Says He's 'Very Serious

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**Elon Musk** (1:24)
SpaceX is planning 100 million square foot semiconductor facility in Grimes County, Texas, designed to produce one terawatt of artificial intelligence computing power per year.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:36)
One terawatt. Yeah. That number is difficult to even process. I mean, if you look at the entire current chip consumption of the United States, right, you add up every single data center, every smartphone in every pocket, every laptop, every connected device. The total sits at roughly half a terawatt.

**Elon Musk** (1:54)
Which is already a huge number.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:55)
Exactly. This single proposed project is aiming to double the entire national output of computing hardware. Yeah.

**Elon Musk** (2:03)
Under one roof. Well, one massive roof.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:05)
They're putting it on site of a shuttered coal plant called the Givens Creek Power Station.

**Elon Musk** (2:10)
We are looking at scenario where a combined aerospace and automotive entity is attempting to bypass the terrestrial power grid entirely.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:18)
Right. Which raises the obvious question. Can an organization primarily known for building rockets and electric cars, realistically master the most difficult manufacturing process on Earth simply to circumvent that local grid?

**Elon Musk** (2:31)
Because semiconductor fabrication is subatomic engineering.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:35)
Yes. It is a field where the margins of error are measured in single atoms.

**Elon Musk** (2:39)
If you're listening to this, I want you to just imagine the physical constraints holding artificial intelligence back right now. If you are holding your phone, that device in your hand gets warm when it works hard.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:50)
Oh yeah, it gets hot.

**Elon Musk** (2:51)
Right. Now multiply that heat and that power drop by millions. You have limits on electrical generation, limits on cooling capacity, and limits on the raw availability of silicon.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:04)
The richest companies are looking to solve those constraints by basically ignoring traditional global supply chains.

**Elon Musk** (3:10)
Yeah. We are looking at what happens when endless capital collides directly with the laws of physics.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:16)
You essentially have two immovable objects meeting. On one side, you have the thermodynamic reality of computing.

**Elon Musk** (3:24)
Right.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:24)
And on the other, you have a corporate mandate to scale at a level that breaks conventional economic models.

**Elon Musk** (3:30)
So the blueprint for this whole thing is called the TeraFab venture. And the financial structure here is a joint effort involving SpaceX, Tesla, XAI, and Intel.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:40)
That's a serious lineup.

**Elon Musk** (3:41)
The numbers attached to the planning documents outline an initial investment of $55 billion.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:46)
$55 billion just to start.

**Elon Musk** (3:48)
Right. With a total expansion ceiling reaching up to $119 billion.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:53)
That is just an unbelievable amount of capital.

**Elon Musk** (3:55)
And the stated goal for the facility is 1 million wafer starts per month, translating to the production of 100 billion to 200 billion custom chips annually.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:05)
Just to put that million wafer starts per month into perspective, we really have to look at the current global leaders.

**Elon Musk** (4:11)
Yeah, the established foundries.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:13)
Right. The largest, most advanced, dedicated semiconductor foundries on the planet. Consider a facility outputting 100,000 wafers a month to be an absolute behemoth.

**Elon Musk** (4:24)
Right.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:25)
So, they want to multiply that by 10 and put it under a single roof.