Musk Says Terafab Aims for Third-Quarter 2028 Mass Production

Elon Musk said Terafab, the chip venture established by Tesla and SpaceX, is targeting mass production in the third quarter of 2028, an aggressive timetable for a U.S. project intended to serve artificial intelligence and robotics.

Musk discussed the target on a SpaceX conference call Tuesday, Oct. 20, and cautioned that the schedule has a wide margin of error. He said he was not yet sure the venture could meet it.

Terafab’s broader goal is to make enough chips each year to support 1 terawatt of computing power for artificial intelligence and robotics. The 2028 date is a target for starting mass production, rather than a completed manufacturing milestone.

Building an advanced logic-chip factory in the United States typically takes more than three years, underscoring the pace of the proposed schedule.

The next planned milestone is a working test chip using static random-access memory (SRAM) circuits at Terafab’s Austin research and development center around May or June 2027. Musk described that date as an internal target.