Elon Musk plans to build the largest factory in the world: it will be bigger than the Pentagon and Apple Park combined

The businessman plans to build in Grimes County, Texasa semiconductor factory named Terafababout 100 million square feet (about 9.3 million square meters). A figure that makes other emblematic constructions look ridiculous, even beyond the technological field.

Tesla’s headquarters and flagship plant in Austin, Giga Parkoccupies 930,000 square meters. Opened in 2022, the Model Y vehicle and, more recently, the Cybertruck are assembled there, in addition to serving as the automaker’s corporate headquarters.

He Pentagonin Arlington, Virginia, has 613,000 square meters. Built in just 16 months during World War II and inaugurated in 1943, it was for decades the largest office building on the planet and today houses some 23,000 employees of the United States Department of Defense.

Apple ParkApple’s headquarters in Cupertino designed by Norman Foster’s studio, totals 262,000 square meters. Its iconic glass ring, inaugurated in 2017, required an investment of close to $5 billion and became a symbol of technological corporate architecture.

Even the Mall of Americain Minnesota, provides another 520,000 square meters.

To take dimension of the ambition of this project, Terafab’s surface area would exceed the sum of those four buildings combinedand would also leave behind the 1,755,000 New Century Global Center in Chengdu, until now considered the largest independent building in the world.

Musk assures that a work of such a scale has never been built, and the images captured with drones over the property already show land preparation work, just five months after the announcement.

Behind the size lies a financial and industrial challenge of similar proportions. SpaceX committed an initial investment of $16.8 billion, although the total cost of the project could rise to $16.8 billion. 119 billionaccording to data from the Reuters agency. The company plans to move forward in phases, negotiating deadlines, budget and board approval at each stage.

Manufacture semiconductors It is not a whim of scale: it requires clean rooms, uninterrupted power supply, huge volumes of ultrapure water, specialized chemical inputs and access to key suppliers, such as the Dutch ASML, with which Musk has already held talks.

Terafab’s future will also be tied to the manufacturing process 14A developed by Intelwhether this technology achieves competitive performance.

In exchange for that risk, SpaceX seeks to concentrate photolithography, logic and memory chip production, advanced packaging and final testing under one roof, with the stated goal of producing one terawatt of computing hardware per year to supply Tesla and SpaceX.

The project starts with defined clients: agreements between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel, and open negotiations with other partners. However, the industry itself recognizes that transforming the plan into an operational factory will not be easy.

Jensen HuangCEO of Nvidia, warned about the technical difficulties facing the initiative. Considers that the ambitious chip megafactory project is “virtually impossible” or extremely difficult to achieve in the short term

Instead, Lip-Bu TanCEO of Intel, endorsed the partnership and highlighted Musk’s ability to explore unconventional manufacturing methods, to the point of stating that he “can’t think of a better partner than Elon Musk.”

The South African businessman himself admits the possibility of failure, although its history includes large-scale projects in automobiles, space launches, satellites, batteries, data centers and electrical generation. As background, in 2024 its teams installed 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days, a task that — according to Huang — normally takes four years.

With Terafab, Musk extends that strategy of controlling each link in the production chain to semiconductors. Construction has already begun; What remains is to check if the project can sustain the financial and technological pace it promises.