Tesla & SpaceX Approve 100-Million-Sq-Ft “Terafab” Megafab in Grimes County, Texas

Musk’s gamble evokes Henry Ford’s River Rouge complex (begun 1917), which collapsed an entire auto supply chain onto one campus; both bet that vertical control beats global logistics. A century later, chipmaking—not steel or cars—defines industrial power, and the American state has loudly backed on-shoring (CHIPS Act 2022), yet here a private venture proposes a budget that rivals NASA’s entire annual outlay. The move spotlights two mega-trends: the AI compute arms race that is pushing tech titans from merely designing chips (Google TPUs 2015, Amazon Trainium 2020) to owning fabs, and the return of gargantuan, resource-hungry physical infrastructure even as many economies “dematerialise.” Whether Terafab reaches its $119 billion ceiling or stalls like Japan’s 1980s DRAM overbuild will shape supply resilience, regional labor markets, and perhaps the geopolitical map of semiconductor capacity decades hence; on a 100-year arc, it may signal the moment private capital, not nation-states, reclaimed the leading edge of strategic manufacturing.