According to Nikkei News, Musk's semiconductor joint venture Terafab is extending its reach into the core areas of global storage chip production capacity. Terafab has revealed to semiconductor equipment suppliers that it plans to achieve a production capacity of 1 million wafers per month by 2032, with 700,000 wafers intended for storage chips and 300,000 wafers for logic chips.
What is shocking about this goal is the scale of its storage chips: Samsung currently has a monthly production capacity of around 650,000 to 700,000 wafers with DRAM, and the target for Terafab's storage chips is comparable to this. For a newcomer that is still in its infancy, whether they can replicate Samsung's current scale within about six years will be a major test for the entire industry landscape.
According to Nikkei News, the procurement team of Terafab has secretly visited Japanese manufacturing equipment manufacturers to negotiate orders, which has become the "hot topic" in the Japanese semiconductor industry, surpassing even local companies. Meanwhile, after Elon Musk publicly criticized TSMC as a "contract manufacturing outsourcer," Terafab is reportedly renegotiating potential cooperation terms with TSMC, with both parties still having disagreements over operational control and the scale of investment.
Terafab is a joint venture in the semiconductor field between Tesla and SpaceX, with Intel providing important technical support. The core vision of this project is to produce 1 terawatt (1000 gigawatts) of AI computing power annually, mainly to serve the computing needs of Optimus humanoid robots and space data centers.
Currently, Terafab has finalized a semiconductor complex project in Grimes County of Texas, with a budget investment of approximately $16.8 billion and a planned future footprint of up to 100 million square feet. At this stage, the project is still in the early preparation phase.
The technical approach of Terafab is also disruptive. This company intends to integrate processes such as mask manufacturing, photolithography, advanced packaging, and testing, which are currently scattered around the world, under one roof, thereby reducing the chip design iteration cycle from the current 6 to 9 months to just a few weeks. In terms of logic chips, Terafab plans to use Intel's 14A manufacturing process.
According to Nikkei News, the procurement team of Terafab has quietly traveled to Japan to explain their ordering plans to Japanese semiconductor device manufacturers and to advance the equipment layout for factory construction.
The Japanese industry generally welcomes this emerging major customer, but some suppliers are confused by their "unconventional" demands. Nikkei quoted a senior executive from a supplier as saying, "What the semiconductor industry is discussing the most right now is neither Kyocera nor Rapidus, but Elon Musk."
At the partnership level, Musk has previously explicitly ruled out the possibility of TSMC holding shares in or operating Terafab. Nevertheless, it is reported that the two parties are still in discussions regarding potential cooperation, with the focus of the dispute being on the operational control structure and the scale of investment. The outcome of these negotiations will to some extent affect whether Terafab can achieve its established production targets on time.
Looking at the overall goal of a monthly production capacity of 1 million wafers, the allocated quantity of storage chips for Terafab (700,000 pieces) significantly overlaps with Samsung DRAM's current production range (650,000 to 700,000 pieces). This comparison not only highlights the macroscopic scale of Terafab's planning but also reveals the high difficulty of its implementation path.
It is worth noting that the yield improvement, equipment delivery cycle, and capital density in the semiconductor industry far exceed those of other manufacturing sectors. Whether Musk's ability to implement projects at lightning speed, as demonstrated in his Tesla Shanghai factory (from construction to shipment taking about a year) and the xAI data center (completed in 122 days), can be replicated in more complex cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, will be a key variable that the market will continue to monitor.
