Elon Musk’s Terafab targets 1 million wafers a month after 2032

Elon Musk's Terafab, a joint venture of Tesla and SpaceX, is reportedly aiming to produce 1 million wafers per month after 2032, according to Financial News. The company has already approached equipment makers to supply the necessary tools, with 70% of the output, or 700,000 wafers, planned for memory applications. The remaining 30%, or 300,000 wafers, are earmarked for logic chips.

Terafab's procurement team has already visited Japan to secure delivery of local toolmakers within months. If all the memory output is DRAM, it would match Samsung's estimated capacity of 650,000–700,000 wafers per month, while SK hynix is reportedly aiming for 1 million wafers a month by 2030. This makes Terafab's memory output 3.5 times the reported 200,000 wafers at SK hynix's Wuxi fab in China.

The timeline for Terafab is aggressive, as it typically takes three years or more to transition from planning to volume production at a leading-edge fab. Terafab is targeting volume production in the second half of 2028, and procurement officials have visited Japan to meet local suppliers and discuss equipment delivery. The company is also exploring technical assistance from a Taiwanese company for memory production, but no partner has been named, leaving the process technology for 70% of the planned wafers undisclosed.

Memory production can be split between DRAM and NAND flash, with the latter used for non-volatile storage. Tesla has a job listing for a Memory Process Integration Engineer at Terafab, which covers end-to-end DRAM process integration and DRAM node development, as well as emerging memories such as MRAM, RRAM, and 3D DRAM. However, Musk has expressed skepticism about the deadlines, calling them "very aggressive" and adding "big error bars" to the timeline.