SpaceX, Elon Musk’s house firm that additionally homes his AI firm, xAI, is contemplating spending $55 billion, a minimum of initially, to construct a semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas, based on a proposal on the county web site.
The corporate estimates it might spend a complete of $119 billion on the venture, which might be a “multi-phase, next-generation, vertically built-in semiconductor manufacturing and superior computing fabrication facility,” based on the submitting.
Musk has beforehand outlined plans for the venture, dubbed “Terafab,” that may even see Tesla contributing assets. The businesses have roped chipmaking big Intel into the trouble, 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 offer 1 Terawatt of energy per yr, arguing that semiconductor producers aren’t making chips shortly sufficient for his corporations’ synthetic intelligence and robotics wants. “We both construct the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we’d like the chips, so we construct the Terafab,” he wrote.
Nonetheless, Musk wrote in a tweet on Wednesday that Grimes County in Texas was solely certainly one of a number of places into consideration for the manufacturing facility.
The submitting comes as Musk has doubled down on guaranteeing xAI has sufficient computing energy accessible 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 alleged to have a valuation of $1.25 trillion and is predicted to go public in June.
