GRIMES COUNTY, TEXAS — Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) will build a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Grimes County, located northwest of Houston. The first phase of the project represents a capital investment of $16.8 billion and is expected to create about 3,000 new jobs within the local economy.
The office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made the announcement late last week, noting that the state had provided SpaceX with a $30 million Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) grant in association with the project, which will be known as Terafab. The facility is planned to span more than 100 million square feet under a single roof, which would make it the largest structure in the world. A construction timeline was not announced.
Founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, SpaceX already houses its global headquarters and Starbase launch facilities in South Texas’ Cameron County. The company also operates a semiconductor research-and-development (R&D) and advanced packaging facility in Bastrop, about 30 miles southeast of Austin, for its Starlink satellite platform.
“The first-of-its-kind Terafab facility will accelerate chip production in Texas at an unprecedented scale, create thousands of good-paying jobs in Grimes County and expand economic opportunity for generations of Texans across southeast Texas and beyond,” said Abbott in last week’s press release.
“We’re embarking on the most epic chip-building effort — combining logic, memory and advanced packaging all under one roof — in Grimes County,” adds Musk. “The Terafab is bringing cutting-edge manufacturing, creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the Lone Star State and enabling us to produce AI chips at scale for use on Earth and in space.”
SpaceX, which went public earlier this summer, saw its stock price open at approximately $135 per share on Monday, Aug. 10, down from its initial public offering (IPO) price of $150 per share. The company also trades on the newly launched Nasdaq Texas under the ticker symbol “SPCX.”
- Taylor Williams