Elon Musk is set to build the largest building on Earth in Texas – a semiconductor megafactory called Terafab.
Two of the trillionaire’s firms, Tesla and SpaceX, confirmed this week they will jointly build the hulking megastructure in Grimes County, near Houston.
The initial phase carries a price tag of £16.8billion (£12.5billion), though the total investment across all planned phases could reach as high as $119billion (£88billion).
Once complete, the complex is set to grow larger than 100 million square feet, making it the largest building on the planet.
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That would be more than five times bigger than the current record holder, China’s New Century Global Centre in Chengdu.
Mr Musk described it as “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.”
“It will be stunningly beautiful,” Musk wrote on X, another of his companies. “Sci-fi city is what we’re aiming for.”
Tesla said both firms “will need far more chips than current and future global production can supply,” with the aim of “producing over one terawatt of compute per year.”
The facility will manufacture logic chips, memory, packaging and testing under a single roof.
Chips made at Terafab will be tailored for Tesla’s Optimus robots and autonomous Cybercabs, as well as high-power processors for SpaceX’s orbital data centres.
Intel has confirmed it will contribute to the project, though the specifics of its role remain unclear.
The factory is expected to generate a minimum of 3,000 jobs, with recruitment focused on Grimes and neighbouring Brazos County.
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SpaceX said it intends to draw water from the reservoir rather than local groundwater supplies.
The record-breaking project has raised eyebrows on this side of the Atlantic, however.
Britain’s notoriously overbearing planning laws and energy costs have led critics to bemoan how firms like Mr Musk’s would never choose the UK for such a project.
“Can you imagine how impossible it would be to try and build something like this here? It would take 50 years,” regular GB News contributor Adam Wren said.
It will occupy land around Gibbons Creek Reservoir, previously used to cool a coal-fired power station that closed in 2018.
In the UK, the notorious HS2 railway is still as many as 13 years from opening – and only then, its first phase from London to Birmingham.
The total costs of the project have shot past £100billion – higher than Terafab – and the maximum operating speed has been slashed by 40 kilometres per hour to cut costs.
On X, software engineer Alexander went viral for his post about Terafab.
“Imagine this in the Midlands,” he said. “100 million square feet, tens of thousands of jobs, a whole supply chain growing up around it, kids in Stoke or Wolverhampton walking into serious engineering careers at 18.
“This is what i want britain to be ambitious about. One project like this would do more for the north than thirty years of levelling up speeches.”
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