People working on Elon Musk's Terafab project are said to be aggressively tapping suppliers for pricing and delivery times for photomasks, substrates, etchers, and more. According to Bloomberg, his people have reportedly talked with Applied Materials Inc., Tokyo Electron Ltd., Lam Research Corp., and even chip manufacturing partner Samsung Electronics Co., with one source saying they reached out to a company during a Friday holiday for an estimate to be delivered the following Monday because Musk wants to move at “light speed."
According to the report, representatives for the project have been asking for "speedy" price estimates, while being decidedly coy about specific products they're planning to build. The inquiries show Musk is serious about his dreams of building his own chips, which he started talking about in late 2025. The billionaire founder may be one of the richest people on earth, but Nvidia’s Jensen Huang warns that building a fab is a complex engineering problem that requires more than money to solve. “Building advanced chip manufacturing is extremely hard,” Huang said. “It is not just building the plant, but the engineering, the science, and the artistry of doing what TSMC does for a living is extremely hard.”
