Moon fab | Electronics Weekly

In February, Musk told staff at xAI – his AI development company – that they need to build a  a factory on the moon to assemble satellites containing datacentres which will then be launched into space using an electromagnetic catapult.

Last week Rapidus CEO Atsuyoshi Koike said he’d like to build a fab on the moon because vacuums and low gravity would be conducive to building high-yielding ICs. “I’m thinking about it very seriously,” said Koike who reckons a moon-based fab could be feasible in the 2040s.

With Rapidus gearing up its 2nm process and looking to move to 1nm and beyond, and with a design partner like Tenstorrent, it could have leading edge AI datacentre ICs ready for deployment in Musk’s satellites by the 2040s.

Space-based semiconductor R&D has so far revolved around materials research and it has been shown that crystal growing in space can produce more uniform structures than crystals  grown on earth.

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