Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Musk Is Building the World's Biggest Chip Factory in Texas, and Three Quarters of It Is Meant for Robots in Orbit

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Musk Is Building the World's Biggest Chip Factory in Texas, and Three Quarters of It Is Meant for Robots in Orbit · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts — the show where the factory is the product. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Tesla and SpaceX are putting sixteen point eight billion dollars into a chip plant in Grimes County, Texas. That's the opening phase.
• 0:15
  [Guest] SpaceX posted the plan itself. Musk called it the largest and most valuable building on Earth, by far. The footprint is close to three times Central Park, under one roof.
• 0:26
  [Host] You can already buy chips. Why build the fab?
• 0:30
  [Guest] Musk answered on Tesla's earnings call: Tesla will be constrained in its ability to scale Optimus production without it. Not cheaper chips. Any chips.
• 0:39
  [Host] And the target?
• 0:40
  [Guest] More than one terawatt of compute a year. They size the plant by how much electricity its output will eat, so the unit of measurement here is the power appetite of a mid-sized country. Hence Terafab.
• 0:53
  [Host] Put the terawatt in context.
• 0:55
  [Guest] Add up every chipmaker on Earth today and you get roughly one fiftieth of it. He isn't joining the industry. He's proposing to dwarf it.
• 1:05
  [Host] Does anyone who builds fabs for a living think that's real?
• 1:09
  [Guest] TSMC's chief executive, C.C. Wei, was asked about Terafab on an earnings call. He said there are no shortcuts, and that the fundamental rules of the foundry game have never changed. Years to build one, years more to ramp it.
• 1:24
  [Host] Who is the output for?
• 1:26
  [Guest] Musk posted his very approximate guess on X: about three quarters for AI spacecraft, the rest for Optimus and Cybercabs.
• 1:33
  [Host] Most of the largest fab ever attempted is going to orbit.
• 1:38
  [Guest] SpaceX calls orbital computing the only truly scalable solution for AI. Sunlight is constant up there, and nobody files a zoning objection in low Earth orbit.
• 1:47
  [Host] They file them on the ground. What did Grimes County say?
• 1:52
  [Guest] Back in June, fifteen residents took the microphone at commissioners court, fourteen of them on the lack of transparency. The commissioners approved a thirty-five-year abatement the next morning, four to one. This Wednesday SpaceX sat in that room and took questions for the first time, with the agreements already signed. Water comes from Gibbons Creek Reservoir rather than local wells.
• 2:14
  [Host] And the people who want it?
• 2:16
  [Guest] The Anderson-Shiro school superintendent, Sarah Borowicz, called it a defining moment for her district, in a statement the governor's office released.
• 2:24
  [Host] Why does the power framing matter?
• 2:27
  [Guest] The essay The Electron Gap argues that compute stopped being capped by wafer supply and started being capped by power delivery. Terafab takes that literally. Musk isn't buying chips at that scale, he's buying the watts to run them.
• 2:41
  [Host] Henry Ford owned his own steel mill. Why is this different?
• 2:45
  [Guest] On the cost curve it isn't, and that part is good news. Antitrust lawyers have a word for owning an input everyone needs. Foreclosure. Rockefeller owned the barrels and the railcars too, and the efficiency and the danger turned out to be the same fact.
• 3:02
  [Host] So the real story is every other robot company.
• 3:06
  [Guest] Tesla wants Optimus under thirty thousand dollars. If the cheapest silicon at that scale comes out of one conglomerate's fab, everyone else builds on rented chips.
• 3:16
  [Host] And for somebody unloading trucks in a warehouse tonight?
• 3:19
  [Guest] At that price, spread over a few years of shifts, the machine pencils out to a couple of dollars an hour before upkeep. No overtime, no callouts.
• 3:29
  [Host] Which is the line Patrick Deglon calls the Substitution Threshold in Unscarcity, the moment the cheapest reliable worker stops being human. Grimes County just signed away a generation of tax revenue to help build the machine that crosses it.
• 3:44
  [Guest] And they were asked. They showed up, and the vote went ahead anyway. For more on vertical integration and the economics of humanoid labor, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.