Elon Musk sends a strong message to Tesla and SpaceX investors

For years, Elon Musk's most ambitious promises across Tesla and SpaceX lived mostly in keynote slides and roadmap timelines. That is starting to change, and Musk himself agreed with the shift.

Someone on X laid it all out . Robotaxi fleet growing. Cybercab event confirmed. Semi rolling off the line. Optimus production starting. A $100 billion spaceport breaking ground.

"The promises are turning into actual factories, vehicles and launch dates," the user wrote. "Now comes the hard part: scaling them."

The trillion dollar chip plant behind the Optimus

At the center of the renewed attention is Terafab, the semiconductor manufacturing project jointly backed by Tesla and SpaceX. The entity behind it, Terafab AI, recently locked in a tax value limitation agreement for its site in Grimes County, Texas.

SpaceX confirmed the location on August 6, with construction set to begin.

The initial commitment is real money. Tesla and SpaceX plan to invest $16.8 billion at the outset and employ at least 3,000 people. A May filing had outlined a potential $55 billion first-stage buildout that could grow to as much as $119 billion across additional phases.

The $16.8 billion is now the officially confirmed first-phase figure, TechCrunch reported.

One important detail the announcement did not lead with: the chips at Terafab will be manufactured by Intel, with Tesla, SpaceX and xAI as anchor customers. The facility is designed to bring logic, memory, packaging and testing under one roof, producing chips for Tesla's Optimus robots and Cybercabs, as well as for space-based data centers SpaceX is developing.

What turned heads was ARK Invest's longer-term framing of the project. ARK estimated Terafab could eventually require $1 trillion in total investment.

A figure that would surpass the inflation-adjusted $704 billion cost of building the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System. That comparison underscores just how large a bet Musk's companies are making on controlling their own chip supply, according to Stocktwits.

Tesla and SpaceX have described the ambition in blunt terms. Musk has said Tesla will work with SpaceX on a one-terawatt compute hardware factory, with Terafab designed to help meet expected demand.

The two companies already have real commercial ties, with Tesla disclosing $143.3 million in 2025 revenue from SpaceX, primarily from vehicle sales including Cybertruck purchases, according to Quartz.