Elon Musk, pictured attending the finals for the NCAA wrestling championship in Philadelphia on March 22, 2025, is considering a site outside of College Station to build his “Terafab” chip manufacturing plant.
Billionaire Elon Musk is considering a site outside College Station for the massive “Terafab” chip manufacturing plant he announced earlier this year.
A location in Grimes County near the Gibbons Creek Reservoir, which is roughly 15 to 20 miles east of Texas A&M University as the bird flies, is one of several spots under consideration, Musk confirmed on X. He said the project would be the “largest and most advanced chip fabrication facility in the world.”
The initial phases would cost $55 billion, with the total project costing up to $119 billion, according to Grimes County. The county’s commissioners court will hold a public meeting June 3 to consider a property tax abatement agreement.
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TERAFAB:
The facility “would represent a transformative investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity,” according to the Grimes County public meeting announcement.
Grimes County Judge Joe Fauth III said the project will be more focused on manufacturing than data center operations. And the proposal includes power generation to support these operations.
Public comments made to the commissioners court have opposed the project, but Fauth said he’s also received at least a dozen phone calls from people supporting it.
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“If we can make this right for most of our citizens, I will be in favor of bringing an organization like this in,” he said. “This is not just a data center. This is a manufacturing operation bringing good, long-term jobs to the county.”
Musk announced his Terafab project in March to support his companies Tesla, xAI (now part of SpaceX) and SpaceX as they develop self-driving taxis, humanoid robots and off-planet data centers. Terafab would eventually produce enough chips for 1 terawatt of compute each year.
Musk planned to start this work with an advanced technology fabrication plant at the Tesla Gigafactory Texas campus in Austin. The full-scale Terafab would need a larger site – and two separate facilities – to make different kinds of chips: one designed for Tesla’s electric vehicles and Optimus humanoid robot and another made to withstand the rigors of space.
“We couldn’t possibly fit the Terafab on the GigaTexas campus. It will be far bigger than everything else combined there,” Musk previously said on X. “Several locations for Terafab are under consideration. It needs thousands of acres and over 10GW of power at full scale.”
Construction is seen north of the Tesla Giga Texas factory in Austin on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. Elon Musk said he would build an advanced technology fabrication plant in Austin as he looks for a larger site to build his “Terafab” chip manufacturing plant that would eventually produce enough chips for 1 trillion watts, or 1 terawatt, of compute each year.
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Musk already has a sizable Texas footprint. His companies and their affiliated entities owned more than 500 properties across 6,000 acres as of September 2025.
These properties are used to build the world’s most powerful rocket outside of Brownsville, refine lithium in Robstown, create a battery storage plant near Dallas, and develop electric vehicles, tunnel-boring machines and Starlink hardware in the Austin area.
SpaceX is also working on Starlink chips in the Austin area.
In March 2025, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that SpaceX would expand its semiconductor research and development and advanced packaging facility in Bastrop, where the company produces hardware related to its Starlink broadband internet satellite business.
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SpaceX was installing equipment at this chip packaging facility in April 2026, according to Reuters, and it hoped the facility would begin production by the end of this year to bring some of its chip packaging for products related to Starlink in-house.
