Musk's Terafab chip manufacturing facility will span 100+ million sq ft—world's largest fab—signaling massive supply-side infrastructure investment.
Musk's Terafab will form the largest interior structure on Earth by a substantial margin. Progress on the chip manufacturing facility is already visible on the ground, less than five months after Musk unveiled the project, as revealed in recent drone footage.
A visualization created by X user Nic Cruz Patane captures the true scale of Terafab's footprint. The facility will reportedly occupy at least 100 million square feet of floor space—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. For context, this is significantly larger than the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, which has an interior space of 18.9 million square feet.
The extraordinary scale serves a functional purpose. Terafab will not be a conventional fab focused solely on chip production. Instead, it will operate as an all-in-one manufacturing facility producing both logic and memory chips, while housing lithography, packaging, and testing operations under a single roof.
Musk began discussing his own chip manufacturing facility in late 2025 and officially announced the Terafab project in March 2026. The driving rationale is computational necessity: SpaceX and Tesla together will require approximately 1 terawatt of compute capacity—more than ten times the current global chip supply.
The ambition has drawn scrutiny from industry leaders. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang cautioned that such a project presents an "extremely hard" challenge. However, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan offered a contrasting perspective, stating he could "think of no better partner than Elon Musk" to explore "unconventional" approaches to chip manufacturing.
Musk's track record with seemingly impossible undertakings is substantial. He transformed Tesla into an EV industry leader through strategic investment and leadership. SpaceX fundamentally disrupted commercial space travel, previously the exclusive domain of NASA and national governments. In 2024, Musk deployed 100,000 NVIDIA H200 GPUs in just 19 days—a feat that typically requires four years.
Terafab represents Musk's most ambitious project to date, with estimated investment requirements of up to $119 billion. While SpaceX and Tesla provide an established customer base, the project carries acknowledged risks of failure despite its secure funding foundation.