Announced August 6 and detailed through county filings in the days after, Terafab is planned at 100 million square feet, roughly ten times Tesla's Giga Texas, and is designed to fabricate chips for Tesla's Optimus robots and Cybercabs plus high-power processors for SpaceX's planned space-based data centers. Texas incentive documents describe a four-phase project with potential investment of up to $119 billion; the $16.8 billion is only the opening commitment.
Off-Grid by Design
The defining choice is energy. The executed tax-abatement agreement states the facilities "are expected to be powered by electricity generated by on-site power plant(s) and are not expected to use electricity from the grid." SpaceX has confirmed natural gas turbines paired with battery storage, choosing Musk-affiliated gas generation over Tesla's own solar products for baseload scale.
Terafab is the logical endpoint of the trend Parselion has tracked all year: as interconnection queues stretch past five years and FERC's reform docket slips, the largest builders are simply exiting the queue. Meta contracted dedicated gas plants; hyperscalers committed 9.8 GW of nuclear; SpaceX now skips the grid entirely. ISO New England's proposed "bring your own generation" requirement would make this voluntary strategy an obligation.
The Second-Order Risks
Off-grid does not mean risk-free. A campus this size becomes its own utility, internalizing fuel supply, turbine maintenance lead times, emissions permitting, and water demands that county infrastructure must still absorb. Gas turbine order books are already stretched by the data center boom, and a single-fuel dependency at 100 million square feet concentrates exposure that grid diversity normally spreads. Parselion's view: the off-grid model solves speed-to-power brilliantly but trades regulated grid risk for merchant energy risk, a distinction investors should price rather than ignore.