Elon Musk to build a 100M-square-foot megafactory in Texas 5 times the size of the worlds biggest building

Elon Musk is about to build something so big it will make the Pentagon look like a strip mall.Tesla and SpaceX confirmed Thursday that Terafab, their jointly built semiconductor megafactory, will rise in Grimes County, Texas, just outside Houston, with a first phase price tag of $16.8 billion. The finished complex is slated to top 100 million square feet, a footprint that would blow past every structure ever built and instantly become the largest building in the world.Musk, who runs both companies, called the facility “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.”For scale, that beats out the current record holder, China’s New Century Global Center in Chengdu, which tops out around 18.9 million square feet with an indoor beach and ski slope tucked inside. Terafab would be more than five times that size. It would also dwarf the Pentagon (6.6 million square feet, making that the current largest building in the US), Apple Park (2.82 million square feet) and the Mall of America (5.6 million square feet) put together several times over. Whether Terafab ultimately claims the title of world’s largest building will come down to whether it gets built as pitched.Renderings of the facility show a sprawling, wing shaped structure carved into the Texas landscape, with a translucent roofline that Musk has promised will be as striking as it is massive.“It will be stunningly beautiful,” Musk wrote on X.Tesla framed the project as an existential supply issue in a post on X. “Both Tesla & SpaceX will need far more chips than current & future global production can supply,” the company wrote, adding that the goal is “producing over 1 terawatt of compute per year.”The site will handle logic chips, memory, packaging and testing all under one roof, an approach SpaceX described in a post on its own website. “The facility will be an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand...