Elon Musk pushing forward with Terafab at 'light speed' — staff reaching out to various suppliers and are reportedly willing to pay a premium to gain priority

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The world’s richest person is willing to throw massive amounts of money at his latest project to leapfrog established fabs.

Elon Musk
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People working on Elon Musk's Terafab project are said to be aggressively tapping suppliers for pricing and delivery times for photomasks, substrates, etchers, and more. According to Bloomberg, his people have reportedly talked with Applied Materials Inc., Tokyo Electron Ltd., Lam Research Corp., and even chip manufacturing partner Samsung Electronics Co., with one source saying they reached out to a company during a Friday holiday for an estimate to be delivered the following Monday because Musk wants to move at “light speed."

According to the report, representatives for the project have been asking for "speedy" price estimates, while being decidedly coy about specific products they're planning to build. The inquiries show Musk is serious about his dreams of building his own chips, which he started talking about in late 2025. The billionaire founder may be one of the richest people on earth, but Nvidia’s Jensen Huang warns that building a fab is a complex engineering problem that requires more than money to solve. “Building advanced chip manufacturing is extremely hard,” Huang said. “It is not just building the plant, but the engineering, the science, and the artistry of doing what TSMC does for a living is extremely hard.”

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The project officially launched in March 2026, less than five months after he first publicly talked about the idea. Musk injected $20 billion into Terafab to kickstart it, although experts estimate that costs could hit more than $5 trillion. Less than a month after the announcement, Intel said it joined the Terafab project to “help refactor silicon fab technology” and “accelerate Terafab’s aim to produce 1 TW/year of compute.” It’s currently unclear what Intel will do for Terafab, but this tie-in allowed the chipmaker, which was on the verge of collapse just two years ago, to hit its highest market cap in 25 years.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • usertests
    'Aight speed.

    Without a secret sauce beyond rapid iteration in the same building, such as that Substrate upstart claiming x-ray lithography, I don't think it will be leapfrogging anything.

    The effort could produce a useful, profitable fab. But not >95% of the world's chips if they are not bringing the fight to ASML.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    A bit short-sighted there. If they work at 'light speed', then they will experience the effects of time dilation; this means they could complete what they are doing, but it will take some years for those of us operating at 'regular speed' to see the results. Silly Musk, I thought he was supposed to be clever.

    And that was my facetious critique of using terms like light speed in this sort of context.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    Neilbob said:
    A bit short-sighted there. If they work at 'light speed', then they will experience the effects of time dilation; this means they could complete what they are doing, but it will take some years for those of us operating at 'regular speed' to see the results. Silly Musk, I thought he was supposed to be clever.

    And that was my facetious critique of using terms like light speed in this sort of context.
    That's not how that works, the time dilation would make it seem almost instant to us while they would spend years. The faster you go the slower time appears to be moving.
    Reply
  • Neilbob
    TerryLaze said:
    That's not how that works, the time dilation would make it seem almost instant to us while they would spend years. The faster you go the slower time appears to be moving.
    Sigh. Stomping all over my sarcasm.

    Although you are right, I got that the wrong way around.
    Reply
  • JTWrenn
    Do we even know what company he is doing this under? Elon is so slippery you just never know what kind of weirdness he is doing to make more money from the hype.
    Reply
  • razor512
    They need to make the first product the fab produces be some DRAM and some NAND for the consumer market.
    Reply
  • Bigshrimp
    razor512 said:
    They need to make the first product the fab produces be some DRAM and some NAND for the consumer market.
    That will never happen. Things are going away from the consumer, not to, unfortunately.
    Reply
  • usertests
    razor512 said:
    They need to make the first product the fab produces be some DRAM and some NAND for the consumer market.
    They said that about 80% of the fab's output is for AI datacenters in space, and 20% is for Tesla Optimus robots or cars. Where they will get their own memory is anybody's guess.
    Reply
  • Stomx
    If Mask put all the materials for Terafab on his Starship and travel for a year like he thinks in space at 0.99 light speed, when he return with it to inform us that he succeeded to assemble this fab, there will be year 2033 not 2027. And year 2096 if travel at 0.9999c. Lorentz factors 7 and 70, that is how time dilation actually works.

    I think he would do a better job not hurrying that much and just staying home :)

    We polluted Earth, near Space and now plan to trash the near planets with Mask as a frontrunner
    Reply
  • duffer9999
    “Building advanced chip manufacturing is extremely hard,” Huang said. “It is not just building the plant, but the engineering, the science, and the artistry of doing what TSMC does for a living is extremely hard.”

    Uh...you mean like rocket science hard?
    Reply