Various media outlets are making a story out of Elon Musk’s claims that his planned Terafab chip plant will be the largest building on Earth, by a large margin. It is supposed to begin volume production in 2027 even as construction will continue for years.
It’s kind of a silly story, because it’s early-stage bluster from a man who tends to promise the stars but “only” delivers the moon — late and inconsistently at that. That still makes him much higher achieving than most, so we shouldn’t count out his ambition entirely. But neither should we be surprised if the Texas building becomes a campus of smaller buildings slated to come online in stages over a longer timeframe.
I share the story because it’s an evocative image that helps capture the scale of AI-industry ambitions. The facility, where SpaceX and Tesla hope to manufacture AI chips at an unprecedented scale for use in cars and datacenters on Earth and in space, is planned to enclose 100 million square feet of floor space, which would be about 15 times more than the Pentagon, the largest building by floor space in the U.S. But the operational Terafab is to employ only about 3,000 people — one-ninth the roughly 27,000 who work at the Pentagon.
Sources seem divided on the world’s current largest building by floor area, but a popular choice is the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, an 18 million square foot multipurpose complex of shopping, entertainment, and offices.
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