SpaceX

See more of our coverage in your search results. Elon Musk is about to build something so big it will make the Pentagon look like a strip mall. 8 billion. The finished complex is slated to top 100 million square feet, a footprint that would blow past every structure ever built and instantly become the largest building in the world. 9 million square feet with an indoor beach and ski slope tucked inside. Terafab would be more than five times that size. 6 million square feet) put together several times over. Whether Terafab ultimately claims the title of world’s largest building will come down to whether it gets built as pitched.

Renderings of the facility show a sprawling, wing shaped structure carved into the Texas landscape, with a translucent roofline that Musk has promised will be as striking as it is massive. “It will be stunningly beautiful,” Musk wrote on X. “Sci-fi city is what we’re aiming for,” he said in another X post. Tesla framed the project as an existential supply issue in a post on X. ” The site will handle logic chips, memory, packaging and testing all under one roof, an approach SpaceX described in a post on its own website. “The facility will be an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand of the future,” the post read.

Semiconductors are needed to control electrical currents, act as the brains of modern electronics, and power everything from smartphones to cars. Chips coming out of Terafab won’t just power laptops and phones. ” The project is expected to create at least 3,000 jobs, with hiring drawn from Grimes and neighboring Brazos County. Tesla and SpaceX have said 60% to 80% of new hires at their other Texas sites have come from local residents, a pattern the companies expect to repeat here. Musk has been eyeing this project since March, when the companies first floated Terafab with a smaller $25 billion headline figure.

8 billion first phase, though total investment across all planned phases could still climb as high as $119 billion. The site itself carries some baggage. Terafab will sit on the Gibbons Creek Reservoir, a body of water once used to cool a coal fired power plant that shut down in 2018. With water use for data centers already a sore subject across Texas, SpaceX moved to get ahead of it. The company said it plans to draw water from the reservoir rather than tap local groundwater. Not everyone in Grimes County is thrilled. Hundreds of residents packed a county meeting Wednesday, a day before the announcement, to raise concerns about the millions of dollars in tax incentives handed to the project and what they called a lack of transparency in how the deals came together.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office has extended a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant to SpaceX for the project, which also qualifies for the state’s Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation program School officials sounded a friendlier note. Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Sarah Borowicz called the moment a defining one for the district in a statement.