PANews August 7, according to TechCrunch, Tesla and SpaceX announced on Thursday that their jointly developed advanced chip factory, “Terafab,” will be located in Grimes County, Texas, United States, near Houston. The project’s initial investment is $16.8 billion.

SpaceX said the factory plans to build more than 100 million square feet (about 9.3 million square meters) of manufacturing space, which will, in the future, become one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world by scale. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that Terafab will be “far beyond other facilities, becoming the largest and highest-value building on Earth.” Previously, in related filings, SpaceX stated that Terafab may adopt a multi-phase construction approach, with total investment of up to $119 billion. Intel has also previously announced it will take part in the project, but it has not yet disclosed the specific ways it will contribute.

It is understood that the core driving force behind the project is Musk’s plans for future AI infrastructure. As humanoid robots, autonomous robotaxis, satellite data centers, and the growing demand for large-scale AI training and inference continue to expand, Tesla and SpaceX are expected to need a large number of dedicated computing chips in the future.