EVwire Brief: Tesla’s planned Terafab could span 100 million square feet, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
This would make it the largest manufacturing facility ever conceived and far larger than any existing factory or major tech campus today.
The Terafab’s actual size estimate emerged after initial observations suggested that the facility would be a ~2 million square foot building near Gigafactory Texas.
Apparently, this giant chip facility near Giga Texas is just the “small” one
Prior to the Terafab launch event, Tesla and SpaceX watcher Joe Tegtmeyer observed that a large piece of land near the Giga Texas main building was being prepared for construction. Speculations then suggested that the area would be the site of the Terafactory.
Sure enough, a render of a large facility in the exact area was shown during Elon Musk’s speech at the Terafab announcement. But in a reply on X, Musk clarified that the building featured in his presentation is only a small advanced technology fab used for chip design iteration.
“No, that’s just the little advanced technology fab… We couldn’t possibly fit the Terafab on the Giga Texas campus,” Musk wrote.
In a post on X, industry observer Phil Beisel provided a rough framework for the scale of the Terafactory.
Based on Tesla’s stated goal of reaching one terawatt of AI compute, and assuming individual chips operate at around 250 watts, Beisel estimated that a terawatt would require something on the order of four billion chips per year.
Producing that volume using current semiconductor manufacturing approaches would require thousands of acres of land and potentially hundreds of millions of square feet of production space.
Beisel suggested that with significant efficiency improvements, a facility on the order of 100 million square feet would be a reasonable estimate.
Musk responded positively to Beisel’s estimate, writing, “Yeah, 100M sq ft is the right order of magnitude.”
What 100 million square feet for Terafab really means
A factory with 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is unprecedented, and it makes all existing factories today, including Tesla’s massive Gigafactories, look small in comparison.
For context, Gigafactory Texas, already one of the largest buildings in the world, spans about 10 million square feet. The Terafab would be roughly ten times larger than Giga Texas.
Apple Park, Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, has roughly 2.8 million square feet of office space. Microsoft’s Redmond campus spans a little over 8 million square feet across dozens of buildings.
The Terafab will be the size of a small city
At 100 million square feet, the Terafab would be roughly 35 times larger than Apple’s HQ and about 12 times larger than Microsoft’s Redmond campus.
For a more fun comparison, the Terafab will be about three times the size of the City of London, and roughly the size of Vatican City, Monaco, and Gibraltar, combined.
The insane size of the Terafab aside, it’s important to remember that the factory is not being designed around today’s manufacturing scale, but around future demand for AI chips. Think Gigafactory 1 before the Tesla Model 3.
Check out our other coverage of the Tesla Terafab Project:
A quick explainer on the Terafactory is and why it’s being made
Elon Musk’s comments on how Tesla/SpaceX/xAI could achieve the Terafactory’s ambitious goals
Source: Elon Musk, Joe Tegtmeyer, and Phil Beisel on X
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