A hearing on June 3, 2026, drew more than 100 residents to the Grimes County courthouse in Texas, Reuters reported.
Speakers warned that Terafab, a chip plant planned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SPCX) for a rural location a few miles outside of College Station, could strain local water and power supplies.
Commissioners approved tax incentives anyway, and as attendees streamed out, one said: “They sold out Grimes County.”
Five months later, that plant has a production target with a date on it.
SpaceX and Tesla Inc. (TSLA) are targeting a capacity of 1 million wafers a month at Terafab from 2032, Nikkei reported on Nov. 9. That is a global chipmaker’s scale, planned for a rural Texas county.
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What the Terafab 1 million wafer goal means
The split inside that number tells more than the total. About 700,000 of those wafers would go to memory chips and more than 300,000 to logic chips, Nikkei reported. By wafer count, Terafab would be mostly a memory plant.
The memory piece alone would rival Samsung Electronics, which reportedly produces an estimated 650,000 to 700,000 DRAM wafers a month. Samsung built that base over decades. SpaceX and Tesla want to match it from 2032 at a factory that is still being built.
The schedule is just as aggressive: Elon Musk wants mass production to start in the second half of 2028, Nikkei noted. Advanced chip plants typically need more than three years to get there, even for established chipmakers.
Some industry participants have already questioned that timeline.
SpaceX and Tesla’s Japan suppliers told to hurry
The pressure shows up first in Japan. Terafab has shared its 2032 target with equipment makers, and its procurement officials recently visited to coordinate orders and delivery schedules, Nikkei reported.
Some suppliers were asked to deliver within a few months, and one called the requested timeline unusually demanding but said it would try.
That urgency matches what Riley Trettel, who oversees energy and data center development for SpaceX, told Grimes County in August.
“We are going to be moving nearly immediately to get going on the project,” he said at a public meeting, Bloomberg reported. He also explained how SpaceX plans to power the site.
SpaceX’s Terafab would devote about 700,000 of its planned 1 million monthly wafers to memory, rivaling Samsung’s DRAM capacity.Walter Cicchetti / Getty Images
The Grimes County fight grows with the plant
“We’re bringing our own power,” Trettel said, according to Bloomberg, adding that SpaceX will build natural gas power plants and very large battery arrays. That would keep Terafab from leaning on the local grid, which residents worried about in June.
Even so, a plant built to produce 1 million wafers a month would need far more generation than its first phase.
Land matters, too. Business Insider has described Terafab as a 100-million-square-foot factory, roughly 3.6 square miles of floor space. Speakers at the June hearing warned it could harm wildlife and permanently alter the county’s rural character, Reuters reported.
Other questions are harder to answer because key paperwork behind the deal is tied up in court. In September, SpaceX sued to block the release of its tax abatement application and records of its negotiations with county officials, Business Insider noted.
The Texas Attorney General’s office had said in July that those records should be released.
That leaves an odd gap. The most detailed production targets for Terafab have surfaced through what it told equipment makers in Japan. Meanwhile, the application SpaceX filed with Grimes County stays out of public view.
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Two places will decide what happens next
None of this means Terafab cannot be built.
It does, however, mean that the 1-million-wafer goal faces two tests at once. One plays out with Japanese toolmakers asked to deliver within months, and the other with a Texas county where residents are still pressing for answers.
The next signals should come from both. Equipment arriving on that compressed schedule would be an early sign that the 2028 start date can hold. If a court orders the records released, residents would see what SpaceX put in writing when it asked for the tax break.
For a factory this large, the local test may prove harder to pass than the technical one.
Chip plants on this scale now depend on local trust almost as much as on equipment. Grimes County is where that is being tested.
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