Elon Musk announced a chip factory 10 times the size of Tesla's Gigafactory. The goal is to produce enough AI compute to equal twice the entire electricity consumption of the United States.
He called it the Terafab.
Here is the number that stopped me cold.
The entire global AI chip industry right now is on track to hit around 100 gigawatts per year of compute. Every Nvidia GPU, every Google TPU, every chip from every company on earth combined. 100 gigawatts.
Musk wants one factory to produce a terawatt per year.
A terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts. Ten times the output of the entire global industry. From a single building.
To put the scale in physical terms, the Terafab would need to be around 100 million square feet. You would need Starship point to point transport just to get from one end to the other.
But the reason for the scale is not ambition for its own sake.
To launch meaningful AI compute into space, you need a billion chips per year running at a kilowatt each. That is not a number the current industry can produce. The Terafab is the only way to get there.
The timeline he put out: a gigawatt of space AI compute annualized by end of next year. Then 10x per year from there. 10 gigawatts by year two. 100 gigawatts by year three. A terawatt beyond that.
Most people think orbital data centers are a decade away.
Musk is building the factory to make them possible by next year.