Terafab is the kind of project that makes “gigafactory” sound oddly modest. Tesla and SpaceX are planning a semiconductor complex in Grimes County, Texas, with roughly 100 million square feet of manufacturing space at full scale.
The project’s official site puts the comparison in unusually blunt terms: about 10 million square feet for Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory versus 100 million square feet for Terafab. In other words, Giga Texas is effectively being used as the measuring stick for something planned to be about ten times larger.
When Giga Texas Becomes the Scale Bar
The size is difficult to visualize because most industrial buildings stop being intuitive long before 100 million square feet. Recent hardware coverage has compared the planned complex with the Pentagon, Apple Park, Mall of America and Giga Texas together. Terafab is not simply another large factory. The full plan is closer to an industrial district placed under one semiconductor program.
That scale is exactly what Joe Tegtmeyer highlighted on X, calling the numbers absurd before noting that the planned footprint is more than 100 million square feet and roughly ten times Giga Texas.
BitcoinVersus.Tech first covered Musk’s Terafab announcement in May, when the project was still closely associated with an Austin precursor fab. The newer Grimes County plan is the full-scale version: a vertically integrated facility intended to combine logic, memory and advanced packaging.
Later This Year Means Construction, Not Chips
Reports that Terafab is “launching later this year” need one important correction. The 2026 timing refers to construction activity, not the opening of a finished fab. Local project filings have listed a 2026 start for the first phase, and September aerial updates indicate that grading and foundation work are already appearing at the site.
That distinction matters because semiconductor fabs are among the most difficult industrial facilities to commission. A completed shell still has to become an operating cleanroom environment packed with lithography, deposition, etch, metrology, packaging and utility systems. Construction can begin in 2026 while first meaningful chip output remains much farther out.
Why Build a Fab This Large?
Tesla and SpaceX are not describing Terafab as a normal merchant foundry. The project is meant to feed an internal technology stack that increasingly depends on custom silicon. Tesla needs AI chips for vehicles and Optimus, while SpaceX is building toward much larger compute requirements for spacecraft and orbital infrastructure.
That connects directly with BitcoinVersus.Tech’s earlier coverage of Intel and Tesla’s robotics-processor work. The chip roadmap and the factory roadmap are becoming parts of the same strategy: design the silicon, control the manufacturing path and scale output around products that may eventually require enormous volumes.
Terafab also sits behind Tesla’s push to scale physical AI. BitcoinVersus.Tech recently examined Tesla’s factory changes for humanoid robot production. If Optimus ever moves from thousands of units to millions, the semiconductor supply chain becomes part of the robotics factory itself.
A Factory Measured in Factories
The cleanest way to understand Terafab may be the strangest one: stop measuring it against normal fabs. Measure it against other megafactories. The project’s own site does exactly that by placing 10-million-square-foot Giga Texas next to a 100-million-square-foot Terafab target.
If the full build is realized, the most notable feature may not be a single process node or chip design. It may simply be that one of the world’s largest factories becomes the unit of measurement for another factory.
BitcoinVersus.Tech
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