Tesla Considers Building ‘Tera Fab’ to Meet Future Chip Needs
An upbeat Elon Musk, with his newly approved trillion-dollar pay package, talked to a very select group of investors at the Tesla annual shareholders meeting yesterday in Austin, Texas, and told the audience he had chips on his brain and planned to build a “Tera fab” that could potentially produce a million wafer starts per month to meet chip demand for Tesla alone.
Musk said that all he could think about was chips at the moment. He also said that with his AI5 chip and the planned AI6 chip, he did not think existing suppliers (TSMC and Samsung) could meet demand. As a result, he would consider some collaboration with Intel and also building Tesla’s own “Tera fab” to meet demand for Tesla’s own products.
“The thing is that we actually have agreed to buy all the chips that are made from the fab. So, it’s basically a money printing machine for TSMC and Samsung. It’s like literally the faster you make the chips, the faster we send them money. But it’s still not going just fast enough,” Musk said during the shareholder meeting.
“So that’s why I think, as far as I can see, the only option is to go build some like very big chip fab. And then you go to solve memory and packaging too. But otherwise, you just tap out at whatever the chip production rate is. And so, I guess, Tera would be—you’d want to say it’s got to be at least 100,000 wafer starts per month size fab. And maybe that would be one of ten in a complex. So, it would ultimately be one million wafer starts per month,” he added.
eetimes.com |
