Elon Musk to start building Terafab project this week

“We make a little fab and see what happens – make our mistakes at a small scale – and then we make a big one,” said Musk at the weekend.

By a big one he means one million wafers a month and he wants to get there by 2030.

By comparison TSMC’s total capacity was 1.3 million 12-inch equivalent wpm  last year and is expected to be 1.5 million wpm this year.

The price for what Musk calks his Terafab is $20-25 billion. Tesla currently has $44 billion in cash.

At Tesla’s last AGM, Musk said the Terafab wwas necessary because: “I can’t see any other way to get to the volume of chips that we’re looking for.”

Musk already has a fab deal with Samsung and has talked  about a possible manufacturing hook-up with Intel.