SpaceX, Elon Musk’s house firm that additionally homes his AI firm, xAI, is contemplating spending $55 billion, not less than initially, to construct a semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, in line with a proposal on the county web site.
The corporate estimates it could spend a complete of $119 billion on the mission, which might be a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically built-in semiconductor manufacturing and superior computing fabrication facility,” in line with the submitting.
Musk has beforehand outlined plans for the mission, dubbed “Terafab,” that will even see Tesla contributing assets. The businesses have roped chipmaking giant Intel into the effort, aiming to develop chips for AI servers, satellites, SpaceX’s proposed information heart in house, in addition to autonomous Tesla automobiles and robots.
The billionaire has stated the manufacturing facility will, someday sooner or later, manufacture sufficient chips to supply 1 Terawatt of energy per 12 months, arguing that semiconductor producers aren’t making chips shortly sufficient for his firms’ synthetic intelligence and robotics wants. “We both construct the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we want the chips, so we construct the Terafab,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, Musk wrote in a tweet on Wednesday that Grimes County in Texas was solely considered one of a number of areas into consideration for the manufacturing facility.
The submitting comes as Musk has doubled down on making certain xAI has sufficient computing energy obtainable to coach and energy its Grok collection of AI fashions. He’s additionally intent on capitalizing on the demand for AI compute by constructing information facilities in house, which he has cited as an enormous motive for combining xAI with SpaceX. The mixed entity is claimed to have a valuation of $1.25 trillion and is expected to go public in June.
