Elon Musk's planned semiconductor plant, dubbed Terafab, is shaping up to be one of the largest buildings ever attempted.
According to Tom's Hardware, the facility will have at least 100 million square feet of interior space — enough, the publication's visualization suggests, to swallow the Pentagon, Apple Park, the Mall of America, and Musk's own Giga Texas factory combined. Tom's Hardware describes it as the largest such structure on Earth "by a big margin."
The reason for the extraordinary footprint, per the same report, is what Musk wants to put inside it. Rather than a conventional chip fab that handles one slice of production, Terafab is envisioned as an all-in-one plant bringing multiple semiconductor manufacturing processes under a single roof.
That is a meaningful departure from how the industry works today. Modern chipmaking is spread across a long international chain: one company designs a chip, another etches the silicon wafers, a third packages and tests them, and materials move between countries at each step. Consolidating those stages into one site would, in principle, cut out much of that shuttling.
It would also be enormously difficult. Each stage of chip production has its own exacting requirements for cleanliness, power, water, and specialized equipment, which is part of why the industry fragmented into specialists in the first place.
Tom's Hardware's report is a projection based on the disclosed interior space, not a finished building, and key details — cost, timeline, staffing, which processes actually make the cut — aren't established in the source. The visualization is best read as a sense of scale for an announced ambition.
Why it matters: if a single site can really house the full chipmaking pipeline, it would challenge the globally distributed supply chain that the world's most valuable technology currently depends on.