Musk’s Terafab projected to be larger than the Pentagon, Apple Park, Mall of America, and Giga Texas, combined — all-in-one chip manufacturing facility visualized to show the project’s massive footprint

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It will form the biggest interior structure on Earth by a massive margin.

Terafab
(Image credit: Terafab)

Most megafactories usually take years to go from conceptualization to construction, but a recent drone flyover of the Terafab showed that progress has already started on the ground less than five months after Musk unveiled it. However, the video doesn’t do justice to the true scale of its footprint, so X user Nic Cruz Patane created a visualization to help us understand how large the chip manufacturing facility is.

The site will reportedly have a floor space of at least 100 million square feet, making it larger than Giga Texas (10 million sq. ft), the Pentagon (6.6 million sq. ft), Apple Park (2.82 million sq. ft), and the Mall of America (5.6 million sq. ft), combined. This also makes it significantly larger than New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, with has an interior space of “just” 18.9 million sq. ft.

While this might seem like an absurd amount of space for chip manufacturing, it appears that the Terafab will need it because it’s going to be more than just a chip fab making AI processors — instead, it will be an all-in-one facility that will produce logic and memory chips, as well as have lithography, packaging, and testing under one roof.

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Elon Musk started talking about building his own chip manufacturing facility in late 2025 and officially announced the project in March of this year. The reasoning behind this project is that both SpaceX and Tesla will require at least 1TW of compute, which is more than ten times that current global chip supply.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that a project like this will be an “extremely hard” challenge, but it appears that Musk is willing to put his massive resources on the line for this. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan even said that he can “think of no better partner than Elon Musk” to explore “unconventional” ways of chip manufacturing.

Musk is no stranger to both leading and funding projects that otherwise seemed impossible. Although he did not found Tesla, his investment and leadership in the company led it to become an industry trailblazer in EVs. He fundamentally changed commercial space travel with SpaceX; something that used to be the purview of NASA and other national governments, and he also broke a record when he set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days back in 2024 — a process which Huang said usually takes four years.

It seems that Terafab is Musk’s biggest project to date, which is estimated to require up to $119 billion in investments. But even though it seems that this project already has a secure customer base in SpaceX and Tesla, the former acknowledges that there’s a risk that this ambitious megafactory may not be successful.

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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.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Why_Me
    Good on Elon.
    Reply
  • ggeeoorrggee
    An impressive and ambitious undertaking. I’m more curious about the logistics. As operations scale up in any endeavor, the logistics do not generally scale linearly. That is to say that at a certain point, the logistics require their own logistics. That knock-on continues down the line as your second, third, and beyond order effects compound.

    Taking the Pentagon as an archaic example, the parking is about twice the area of the building and that just a first-order logistics item.

    In the case of this complex, I’m assuming a huge level of automation but even that just removes a level of order. But to the Pentagon example, there is no massive influx of raw materials and output of product.
    Reply
  • PEnns
    Sounds impressive on paper but nobody mentioned the usual stuff:

    Will it generate its own energy, water and have an in-house waste disposal / sewage facility as well??

    And speaking of the Pentagon parking.....how big will its parking area be? Shuttle buses or mega drones to move employees around??
    Reply
  • jp7189
    ASML better get cracking, or is Elon planning to build his own EUV tools?
    Reply
  • LordVile
    PEnns said:
    Sounds impressive on paper but nobody mentioned the usual stuff:

    Will it generate its own energy, water and have an in-house waste disposal / sewage facility as well??

    And speaking of the Pentagon parking.....how big will its parking area be? Shuttle buses or mega drones to move employees around??
    Also raw materials, there’s a reason why semiconductor work is mainly done in Asia and its logistics
    Reply
  • Afrospinach
    jp7189 said:
    ASML better get cracking, or is Elon planning to build his own EUV tools?
    He has criticised ASML's machines productivity so that is probably on the cards. I would hope that this project does not hinge of that though because ASML are not playing around.
    Reply