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SpaceX plans to build its own power plants to support the massive semiconductor manufacturing facility it’s developing in Texas with Tesla Inc.
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“We’re bringing our own power,” Riley Trettel, who oversees energy and data center development for SpaceX, said Wednesday during a public meeting in Grimes County, Texas. “We’re going to be building natural gas fired power plants, and we’re going to be building very large battery arrays in order to store energy.”
The comments offer fresh insight into the plans by Elon Musk’s two biggest companies for the new plant, known as Terafab. SpaceX and Tesla on Thursday confirmed that the chip facory will be built in Grimes County, with an initial phase expected to cost $16.8 billion.
Terafab
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
The project, which is expected to create 3,000 new jobs, will receive a Texas Enterprise Fund grant of $30 million. The 100 million-square-foot facility will be constructed in phases on a footprint of roughly 3,000 acres, but SpaceX has over 13,000 acres currently under its control.
Musk, the chief executive officer of both SpaceX and Tesla, has said the semiconductor industry is moving too slowly to keep up with the amount of chips needed for his initiatives and that of the broader tech industry, and he has warned of geopolitical risks.
Intel Corp. joined the project in April and is expected to lend its expertise in designing, fabricating and packaging. Musk expects the facility to make two kinds of chips: one for use in Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots and electric cars, and another designed for use in space.
Surging power demand from data centers and new factories has driven demand for new gas plants, and Musk has long been a fan of vertical integration.
Musk and his companies are not strangers to the Texas energy market. Tesla makes utility-scale battery energy storage devices known as Megapacks, and has a Megapack factory west of Houston.
Read More: Tesla Is Plugging a Secret Mega-Battery Into the Texas Grid
“We are going to be moving nearly immediately to get going on the project,” Trettel said. “We need to get our civil work started. We need to start to get foundations in place, and we’re going to get cracking.”
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