Musk says his companies will run the $16.8B Terafab chip plant in Texas themselves, with TSMC at most a tenant
Musk made the point in an X post on Wednesday, ending speculation that TSMC might operate the site. He said TSMC is being considered only as a possible tenant leasing part of the facility. Intel remains the named process partner. The plant is meant to supply chips for Tesla vehicles, Optimus robots, xAI and SpaceX. The statement comes a day after reports that SpaceX is looking for about $40B in debt, led by Apollo, to fund a large Nvidia order. Musk has said xAI's Colossus 2 cluster already holds 110,000 GB200 and 440,000 GB300 chips. Terafab is the longer-term attempt to reduce that reliance on outside suppliers. Running a leading-edge fab is very hard, and companies far more experienced than Musk's have struggled with it. If Terafab ever reaches volume, it would add custom silicon capacity outside TSMC. Builders should treat it as a multi-year bet, not a near-term source of compute.
