In partnership with
TESLA
Elon Musk says AI and robots now need a gigantic fab.
Elon Musk isn’t exaggerating when he says Tesla may need to build a gigantic chip fab.
The company’s ambitions in artificial intelligence and robotics are pushing its compute demands beyond what even the world’s top chipmakers can supply.
The idea: Tesla could one day manufacture its own silicon at massive scale.
It’s a radical move, but one that fits Musk’s pattern, when the system can’t keep up, build your own.
The shift
Tesla already designs its own AI chips for the Dojo supercomputer, used to train its self-driving models.
But now, Musk says demand for compute is skyrocketing tens of millions of chips may be needed in the next few years.
With global supply chains strained and NVIDIA soaking up capacity, Musk hinted Tesla might have to take chipmaking into its own hands.
In Musk’s world, vertical integration is how you stay alive.
The challenge
A semiconductor fab is among the most complex things humans make… cleanrooms, rare materials, nanometer precision.
It costs tens of billions and takes years to build.
Even Intel and TSMC struggle to keep up. For Tesla, a newcomer, the learning curve would be brutal.
But Musk has made a career out of ignoring impossible.
The bigger play
If Tesla succeeds, it would own every layer of its AI stack, from hardware to algorithms to products.
That could supercharge development, cut costs, and eventually position Tesla as a supplier of AI compute to others, not just a consumer.
Reflection
Tesla’s potential chip fab is less about silicon than sovereignty.
The drive to own every dependency in a world where bottlenecks can break you.
Musk’s instincts have always been to internalize complexity rather than outsource it.
Maybe that’s what it takes to build a truly intelligent machine knowing every layer, down to the atoms.
The next industrial revolution won’t be powered by oil or code but by who owns the chips that think.
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