Jake Chung

Terafab may be the most essential vertical integration Tesla has ever undertaken— and it is truly non-optional. It will take years to build and will test even Elon’s speedrunning abilities to the limit, but that won’t stop him from trying. The breakthrough likely lies in overhauling the overall facility’s cleanroom model. By moving wafers in sealed pods with localized micro-environments, the fab no longer needs a monolithic ultra-clean space. Elon’s line about “eating cheeseburgers and smoking cigars” on the fab floor isn’t silly, it’s the practical reality of a radically simpler, cheaper, faster approach that could finally change the economics of chipmaking. This is all forced by the brutal “pinch” in chip supply. Tesla must produce on the order of 100–200 billion AI chips per year just to saturate its roadmap. That volume powers: FSD cars & Robotaxis (tens of millions of vehicles needing AI5 inference for near-perfect autonomy), Physical Optimus (scaling from thousands today to millions per year, each requiring AI5/AI6-level compute), Digital Optimus (the new xAI-Tesla software agents for digital/office automation, running massive inference clusters), Space-based data centers (AI7/Dojo3 orbital compute for GW-scale training and inference beyond Earth limits). AI5 delivers the ~10× leap for vehicles and early robots; AI6 shifts focus to Optimus + terrestrial DCs; AI7 goes orbital. No external foundry (TSMC, Samsung, etc.) can deliver that scale or timeline— hence the Terafab launch. Without it, the entire robotics + autonomy future hits a brick wall. Terafab isn’t optional; it’s the only way forward.

JUST IN: Elon Musk says SpaceX will "far exceed" everyone in AI

2026 is the year the steering wheel begins to fade away. Autonomy is here.

Oh and it works in all AI4-equipped cars, so your car can do office work for you when not driving. We’re also deploying millions of dedicated Digital Optimus units in the field at Superchargers where we have ~7 gigawatts of available power.

*TESLA IS DESIGNING THE PRODUCTION LINE TO MAKE HUNDREDS OF CYBERCABS A WEEK - WSJ $TSLA

Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint xAI-Tesla project, coming as part of Tesla’s investment agreement with xAI. Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of real-time computer screen video and keyboard/mouse actions. Grok is like a much more advanced and sophisticated version of turn-by-turn navigation software. You can think of it as Digital Optimus AI being System 1 (instinctive part of the mind) and Grok being System 2. (thinking part of the mind). This will run very competitively on the super low cost Tesla AI4 ($650) paired with relatively frugal use of the much more expensive xAI Nvidia hardware. And it will be the only real-time smart AI system. This is a big deal. In principle, it is capable of emulating the function of entire companies. That is why the program is called MACROHARD, a funny reference to Microsoft. No other company can yet do this.

This is the first time we've seen the Cybercab's side repeater washer, b-pillar washer and rear camera washer all cleaning at the same time. Look how strong the side repeater washer is. RIP dirt lol