Tesla and SpaceX Committed $16.8 Billion to One Chip Plant.
Tesla’s Entire Annual Profit Is $3.8 Billion
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) said on Aug. 6 that they will spend $16.8 billion on the first phase of Terafab, a semiconductor plant in Grimes County, Texas. Tesla’s net income over the past 12 months was about $3.8 billion — so the two companies’ opening commitment alone is more than four times what Tesla currently earns in a year. The plan is enormous even by chip-industry standards.
Terafab is designed to put logic, memory, packaging, and testing under one roof, across more than 100 million square feet, about an hour northwest of Houston. The companies say the site will draw water from the Gibbons Creek Reservoir rather than local groundwater. The chips are meant for Tesla’s Optimus robots and its Cybercab, plus the high-power processors SpaceX wants for space-based data centers.