Musk warns: AI chips and memory are in severe shortage; Terafab is being built at Giga Texas, burning $3 billion to run Intel 14A for SpaceX delivery.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned during the Q1 2026 earnings call: both logic and memory chips will face severe shortages. If Tesla does not manufacture them in-house, the company will inevitably hit production bottlenecks—this is the very reason for the birth of Terafab. During the earnings call, he disclosed for the first time that the research facility will be located at the Giga Texas campus, with a budget of approximately $3 billion, utilizing the Intel 14A process, and producing thousands of wafers per month. He also revealed the core logic of the integrated architecture: lithography mask creation, logic, memory, and packaging will all be housed within the same building, while the "scaling phase" from the research facility to mass production will be undertaken by SpaceX. (Context: What is Terafab? How does Musk, who claims global chip supply meets only 2% of demand, plan to build a factory "larger than TSMC"?) (Background: Musk responds to C.C. Wei: Terafab will always be TSMC's largest customer, not a competitor.) "In terms of industry growth speed, we anticipate that if we do not manufacture chips ourselves, we will encounter bottlenecks in both logic chips and, even more so, memory chips. This is why Terafab was born." On April 22, during the Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call, this statement by Musk provided the most direct definition of the Terafab project: it is not a bargaining chip to pressure suppliers, but a realization that Tesla sees no path to rely on external supply amid the explosion of AI compute—in-house production is the only solution. During the earnings call, Musk disclosed the specific outline of the research facility for the first time: the site is confirmed at the Giga Texas campus, with a budget of approximately $3 billion, a monthly capacity of thousands of wafers, and the use of the Intel 14A process. Musk explained that Terafab is planned to start as a research facility and gradually scale up to mass production; by the time Terafab enters the "initial scaling phase," the Intel 14A process is expected to be ready for mature mass production, aligning with the timeline. Notably, the "scaling phase" from the research facility to mass production will not be handled by Tesla alone—Musk explicitly stated that SpaceX will take over this execution. The mass production expansion and system integration experience accumulated by SpaceX in rocket manufacturing are seen as the key leverage for Terafab to bridge the gap from laboratory scale to industrial scale. The most disruptive design of the research facility is the ultimate vertical integration: lithography mask creation, logic chips, memory chips, and packaging are all concentrated in the same building. Musk stated bluntly during the earnings call: "You won't find another place in the world that puts these four things under one roof." There is a clear engineering logic behind this integrated architecture—a quick iteration loop. In the traditional chip development process, mask creation, logic design, memory integration, and packaging/testing are scattered across different suppliers and locations, with every round of back-and-forth costing weeks or months. Terafab compresses the entire chain into one building, aiming to allow Tesla to iterate AI chip designs at several times the industry speed, supporting the rapid evolution of product lines such as the Optimus robot, FSD, and xAI compute. The new information from the Q1 earnings call is the latest node in a series of recent Terafab actions. Earlier, Intel officially announced its participation in the Terafab project, joining SpaceX and Tesla in building the terawatt-level AI compute infrastructure. In terms of talent, Tesla has actively recruited in Taiwan, offering triple salaries to attract engineers familiar with the 2nm process and CoWoS advanced packaging, directly targeting TSMC's core technical talent pool. Addressing external concerns regarding competition with TSMC, Musk clearly stated: "Terafab will always be TSMC's largest customer, not a competitor." This echoes the positioning logic of Terafab—the goal is to fill the absolute gap in AI compute, not to replace the existing foundry system. He previously suggested that global AI compute annual capacity is about 20 GW, which only meets 2% of his long-term demand estimates; the scale of the gap is unimaginable for the existing supply chain. Looking at the financial figures, the $3 billion budget for the Terafab research facility is just the beginning. Analysts at Bernstein estimate that to truly fill the compute gap described by Musk, the total construction cost could reach as high as $5 trillion, while Tesla's official total budget range is $25 billion to $40 billion. The first phase of the project is scheduled to begin production in the second half of 2027, reach mass production in 2028, and be fully completed by 2030. When the world's most high-profile tech entrepreneur

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Musk predicts: severe shortages of AI chips and memory; Terafab to be built at Giga Texas, spending $3 billion to run Intel 14A for SpaceX delivery

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Published:2026-04-23 02:53:44

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