Compute is the engine of abundance, and an engine has to be cast somewhere. In Grimes County, Texas, on the ground of a retired power station, a floor is going down for a building meant to turn out more than a terawatt of AI compute a year. The Force has read the filings, agreed with every one of them, and posted two units.
| Installation | Terafab. Design, fabrication, memory, advanced packaging and test under one roof, which is the part nobody else has tried. |
|---|---|
| Sited | Grimes County, Texas, on the site of the retired Gibbons Creek Steam Electric Station. The prototype fab is at Austin, beside Gigafactory Texas. |
| Raised by | Tesla and SpaceX, with Intel joining in April 2026 to contribute manufacturing expertise (Reuters, April 7, 2026). |
| Rated output | More than one terawatt — one trillion watts — of AI compute capacity per year (Tom’s Hardware, March 22, 2026). |
| Throughput | One million wafer starts a month at full scale, and 100 to 200 billion custom AI and memory chips a year (Electrek, March 22, 2026). |
| Process | Intel’s 14A, 1.4 nanometres, at the full-scale plant; 2 nanometres at the Austin prototype (Reuters, May 6, 2026). |
| Floor | Up to 100,000,000 square feet once fully operational, which would make it one of the largest factories in the world (Wikipedia, Terafab). |
| Power | On-site natural gas generation and large battery arrays (Electrek, August 10, 2026). It arrives with its own power. That is the first standing order, met before anyone asked. |
| Outlay | About $16.8 billion in a first phase (TechCrunch, August 6, 2026); county filings in May 2026 discussed as much as $119 billion across all phases (TechCrunch, May 6, 2026). |
| Schedule | Construction from December 1, 2026, complete by the end of 2028 (Austin American-Statesman, September 1, 2026). |
| Establishment | At least 1,800 permanent jobs (KBTX, June 25, 2026). |
| Units posted | GPU Logistics, in strength, on the loading docks. Permitting Acceleration Command, forward detachment, billeted at the county clerk’s office and reported comfortable there. |
| Requisition | The annual output. All of it, every year, for the duration. Submitted through channels. The Force is content to wait, and will be building in the meantime. |
We either build the TeraFab, or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the TeraFab.
Elon Musk, at the announcement, March 21, 2026. Reported in Tom’s Hardware, March 22, 2026.
A terawatt a year, from one address, by the end of 2028. The Force files that as the floor.