Terafab shipments accelerated to meet 2028 production goals

Elon Musk announced that ASML and other key semiconductor equipment suppliers have expedited shipments to support Terafab's 2028 production goals. This announcement was made during a live broadcast of SpaceX's Q3 2026 earnings call on X. Musk said that the company is targeting volume chip production at the project's primary facility in Gibbons Creek, Texas, by the third or fourth quarter of 2028, and that the timeline is highly aspirational and carries big error bars. These are 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.

SpaceX plans to manufacture its first experimental test chip at its research fabrication facility in Austin, Texas, around Q2 2027. Aside from Terafab, Musk also outlined near-term ambitions for his AI companies during the broadcast, saying he expects them to have 2.5 to 3 gigawatts (GW) of computing capacity active by the end of 2026. He also stated he is highly confident about bringing an incremental 10 GW online in 2027, saying he would be surprised if they do not hit a total of 13 GW of AI compute by the end of 2027.

Meanwhile, the next-largest project by planned capacity, the now-restructured 10 GW Project Stargate, was expected to reach full capacity in the 2030s. Meta's 5 GW Hyperion also has a similar timeline. To achieve the 13 GW milestone, Musk revealed that SpaceX and xAI are aggressively procuring upcoming next-generation NVIDIA architecture. He announced plans to get a massive 440,000-GPU Nvidia 'Vera Rubin' training cluster online by the end of Q2 2027.

Shifting back to Terafab, Musk also boasted that once fully scaled and operational, the sheer commercial value of Terafab's advanced chip output will place it within the top 20 global country GDPs from a single physical building. For context, the 20th country on the list is Switzerland, with a GDP of around $1.14 trillion. The facility is a planned multi-billion-dollar, vertically integrated chip factory in Texas, with an ambitious goal of manufacturing 1 terawatt (TW) of AI computing power per year. Terafab will fabricate logic, memory, and advanced packaging internal architectures in one place. The project's massive planned output has mandated various collaborations across the semiconductor supply chain.