SpaceX and Tesla have announced the selection of a site for the construction of the Terafab semiconductor manufacturing plant. The facility will be located in Grimes County, Texas. According to the head of both companies, Elon Musk, the initial investment in the first phase of the project will amount to $ 16.8 billion. Earlier, in March, the figure of $ 25 billion was announced, and the total cost of implementing all stages could reach $ 119 billion.

The production complex will cover an area of 9.3 million square meters. It is planned to combine the processes of production, packaging and testing of microcircuits within one case. The project will create at least 3,000 jobs for residents of Grimes and Brazos counties. The plant will specialize in the production of two product categories: chips for peripheral computing and inference, designed for Tesla Optimus and Robotaxi Cybercab robots, as well as high-performance solutions for SpaceX orbital data centers. Water from the Gibbons Creek reservoir will be used to cool the equipment, while the company has committed not to use local underground sources.

The SpaceX IPO prospectus describes the Terafab project as a "common framework." At the moment, there are no binding agreements between SpaceX and Tesla, and the distribution of intellectual property rights and obligations to continue participating in the project are not legally fixed. In April, Intel also announced its participation in the construction, which, according to preliminary data, may take over direct production. The agreements for the construction of the plant coincided with a significant increase in SpaceX's capital expenditures on computing infrastructure. In the second quarter, these expenses increased more than sixfold year-on-year, reaching $18.37 billion, of which $15.83 billion was allocated to the development of areas related to artificial intelligence. Elon Musk predicts an increase in his own computing capacity to about 10 GW by the end of 2027. At the same time, the company purchases equipment from third-party manufacturers for current tasks: on August 4, it announced a partnership with Nvidia, whose graphics and central processing units will be installed on Starmind AI1 satellites.

The implementation of the large-scale project required the provision of tax incentives from local authorities. The Grimes County Council approved a full exemption from county property and equipment taxes through 2036 in exchange for fixed payments of $10 million at a time and $20 million annually. The school tax discount was provided through the JETI program for a period of ten years. Disagreements arose around the agreement: in the announced documents, SpaceX indicated investments of $ 55 billion, while the agreement fixes $ 5 billion by 2030 and the creation of 1,800 jobs by 2035, with the possibility of withdrawing from the project with 30 days notice. The representative of the company noted that, taking into account fixed payments, the total amount of payments to the district over 35 years will amount to 710 million dollars. As part of its environmental obligations, the company plans to build its own gas-fired power plants and use a closed water cycle. The first excavation work on the site will begin in the near future.