By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 20 (Reuters) - The chip manufacturing joint venture between SpaceX and Tesla called Terafab aims to reach volume production by the third quarter of 2028, Elon Musk said on a SpaceX conference call on Tuesday.
"I put big error bars on this because we don't know if we will actually achieve this or not," Musk said, referring to the timeline.
The timeline is a rough schedule for a project that aims to produce 1 terawatt a year of computing power for AI and robotics,
on a schedule Musk himself called "very aggressive." In the United States, cutting-edge logic factories can take three or more years to build.
Musk has described the planned complex in Texas as combining advanced manufacturing, packaging and testing of both advanced logic and memory chips in one facility.
On Tuesday, Musk said that internally, Terafab aims to have a first test chip, using static random-access memory (SRAM) circuits, functional in roughly May or June of next year at the Terafab research facility in Austin.
Chip manufacturers commonly fabricate SRAM circuits as a method of refining manufacturing process development.
MUSK CAUTIONS ON AMBITIOUS DATES
Musk has a history of setting timelines that his companies have missed. The SpaceX CEO described the Terafab timeline as the company's aspiration and said the dates are "very aggressive."
"Let's just say that outcome of achieving volume production is at least in the set of possible outcomes for Q3 or Q4 of '28," Musk said. "So these are obviously like insanely fast time frames for chip production."
EQUIPMENT ACQUISITION CHALLENGE
On the SpaceX conference call, a sell-side analyst asked Musk whether SpaceX had placed orders for the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines produced only by the Dutch company ASML. The EUV machines are necessary to produce the most cutting-edge chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
Musk did not answer the question directly and said, "Now these were very aggressive dates, and we're very appreciative of ASML and all of our other suppliers in accelerating equipment deliveries in order to achieve this outcome."
One of the challenges Terafab faces is acquiring enough of the complex, expensive semiconductor manufacturing equipment from ASML or American suppliers such as Applied Materials and KLA.
Intel said in April that it would join the Terafab project to help accelerate Terafab's goals. Intel also posted a photo of CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Musk shaking hands, saying it hosted the world's richest man at its campus that month. The companies have not revealed how the collaboration would function in practice.
Earlier this month, Musk said there had been discussions about potential cooperation with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's largest advanced chip manufacturer. But Musk later said Terafab is committed to running the facility itself.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
