Elon Musk to build the biggest building in the world — spanning a colossal 100M square feet

Elon Musk is about to build something so big it will make the Pentagon look like a strip mall.

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Tesla and SpaceX confirmed Thursday that Terafab, their jointly built semiconductor megafactory, will rise in Grimes County, Texas, just outside Houston, with a first phase price tag of $16.8 billion. 

The finished complex is slated to top 100 million square feet, a footprint that would blow past every structure ever built and instantly become the largest building in the world.

Musk, who runs both companies, called the facility “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” adding “sci-fi city is what we’re aiming for,” in another X post.

For scale, that beats out the current record holder, China’s New Century Global Center in Chengdu, which tops out around 18.9 million square feet with an indoor beach and ski slope tucked inside. 

Terafab would be more than five times that size. 

It would also dwarf the Pentagon (6.6 million square feet, making that the current largest building in the US), Apple Park (2.82 million square feet) and the Mall of America (5.6 million square feet) put together several times over. 

Whether Terafab ultimately claims the title of world’s largest building will come down to whether it gets built as pitched. Renderings of the facility show a sprawling, wing shaped structure carved into the Texas landscape, with a translucent roofline that Musk has promised will be as striking as it is massive.

“It will be stunningly beautiful,” Musk wrote on X.

Tesla framed the project as an existential supply issue in a post on X. 

“Both Tesla & SpaceX will need far more chips than current & future global production can supply,” the company wrote, adding that the goal is “producing over 1 terawatt of compute per year.”

The site will handle logic chips, memory, packaging and testing all under one roof, an approach SpaceX described in a post on its own website. 

“The facility will be an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand of the future,” the post read.

Semiconductors are needed to control electrical currents, act as the brains of modern electronics, and power everything from smartphones to cars.

Chips coming out of Terafab won’t just power laptops and phones. 

The company said it “will produce chips optimized for edge computing and inference for use in hardware like Tesla’s Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, along with high-power chips designed for operating SpaceX’s space-based data centers.”

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The project is expected to create at least 3,000 jobs, with hiring drawn from Grimes and neighboring Brazos County. 

Tesla and SpaceX have said 60% to 80% of new hires at their other Texas sites have come from local residents, a pattern the companies expect to repeat here.

Musk has been eyeing this project since March, when the companies first floated Terafab with a smaller $25 billion headline figure. 

The number has since been revised down to the current $16.8 billion first phase, though total investment across all planned phases could still climb as high as $119 billion.

The site itself carries some baggage. 

Terafab will sit on the Gibbons Creek Reservoir, a body of water once used to cool a coal fired power plant that shut down in 2018.

With water use for data centers already a sore subject across Texas, SpaceX moved to get ahead of it. The company said it plans to draw water from the reservoir rather than tap local groundwater.

Not everyone in Grimes County is thrilled. Hundreds of residents packed a county meeting Wednesday, a day before the announcement, to raise concerns about the millions of dollars in tax incentives handed to the project and what they called a lack of transparency in how the deals came together.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office has extended a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant to SpaceX for the project, which also qualifies for the state’s Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation program

School officials sounded a friendlier note. Consolidated Independent School District Superintendent Sarah Borowicz called the moment a defining one for the district in a statement. 

Intel is also circling the project. The chipmaker has confirmed it will contribute to Terafab, though it has not detailed the nature of its involvement.

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The Post has reached out to Tesla and SpaceX for comment.