Elon Musk has tweaked his chip fab fantasy again, and this time, he is ditching the basic idea that fabs need cleanrooms.
At Tesla’s last shareholder meeting, Musk floated the idea of building a network of chip facilities to keep up with demand for custom silicon.
Tesla has signed up with Samsung Foundry for its AI5 and AI6 chips, but Musk has now told Moonshots host Peter Diamandis that his so-called TeraFab could crank out 2nm.
Tesla, chief executive Elon Musk said: “I think they are getting clean rooms wrong in these modern fabs. I am going to make a bet here that Tesla will have a 2nm fab, and I can eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the fab.”
Cleanrooms exist because tiny contamination particles wreck yields, which is why outfits like TSMC spend ‘billions’ locking down airflow, filtration and people in bunny suits.
If Musk genuinely wants cigar smoke drifting across wafers, his yield rates are going to look like a bonfire, and wafer output will follow it. Fortunately, he has people who pay him a lot of money for making dipshit decisions like that and are happy to pay him even more.
Musk also talked up demand of 100 billion to 200 billion chips per year arriving sooner than he expected, which is ambitious even by his usual standards. It is worth pointing out that his usual predictions are not exactly on time. We are still waiting for the cheap robot which can do all our household chores, or for a colony on Mars.
To make matters worse, Tesla has zero track record in semiconductor manufacturing, so chasing 2nm means it either buys its way into partnerships or learns some very expensive lessons in public. It is probably not the best time to test the “clean room philosophy” with a cigar and a cheeseburger.
The AI frenzy is squeezing supply across big tech, and Tesla clearly wants control of its destiny, even if it starts with a cigar and a cheeseburger.
