For forty years the chip industry got rich by splitting apart. Designing chips, manufacturing them, and building the machines that manufacture them became three separate businesses, because specialists beat generalists at all three. Nvidia designs chips, owns no factories at all, and is the most valuable chip company on Earth.
Elon Musk is betting that era is ending — that computing power is about to stop being something anyone can buy, and that the only way to get it is to own every step.
Today: the Grimes County site is chosen, $16.8B is committed, and Intel says its process reaches volume production in 2028. After that, Bernstein put the full terawatt ambition at 142–358 new chip factories and $5–13 trillion — using today's chip designs, on today's machines. That qualifier matters: this industry's whole history is getting more computing power out of the same piece of silicon.
What moves more slowly is the machines. ASML expects to ship about 65 lithography systems this year, to the entire industry; Intel is scheduled to receive five in 2027. Which is the lesson: owning more of the chain relocates the bottleneck rather than removing it.