In the realm of his other unrealistic plans and potentially broken promises, Elon Musk's Terafab stands out as one of the biggest pipedreams, promising to boost semiconductor production by 50x for the benefit of orbital datacenters. But hey, this idea must have legs, because now Intel has announced it is joining the aspiring Bond villain's initiative.
"If you add up all the fabs on earth combined, they're only about 2% of what we need for the… Terafab project," Musk said.
In case you were wondering, Musk has never built a wafer fab before. Neither have any of his companies. So when the world's richest man revealed a pie-in-the-sky plan to build a factory capable of churning out enough chips to make his dream a reality, folks were understandably skeptical.
Fabs are among the most complex and expensive facilities in the world. It can cost $30 billion and take as long as five years to bring a modestly-sized facility online, and that's if you already know what you're doing.
There is nothing modest about what Musk has proposed.
But at least it's "going to be happening" in a city with skyrocketing electrical costs and in a yearslong drought.
"We will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind [including] logical memory," Musk said of the first Terafab facility, which will purportedly be located in Austin, Texas, which has become the fabulist hecto-billionaire's geographic center of gravity over the last few years. "So in a single building, we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recursive loop for improving the chip design."
Let's be reasonable. It's not going to be "in" Austin, because then the city has jurisdiction. Just look out for annexation, Elon.