Elon Musk’s Terafab, a joint venture of Tesla and SpaceX, has informally told equipment makers it is seeking to produce 1 million wafers per month after 2032, according to Financial News. About 70% of this output, or 700,000 wafers, is planned to go to memory, with more than 300,000 going to logic chips. Terafab’s procurement team has already visited Japan to ask some local toolmakers for delivery within months. The memory allotment would rival Samsung’s estimated DRAM production capacity if it were all of that type.

Samsung’s DRAM capacity was estimated last year at 650,000–700,000 wafers a month, while SK hynix is reportedly at about 550,000, with about 1 million a goal by 2030. The comparison has to be taken in context, as Terafab’s 700,000 measures all of its expected memory output, which could be NAND or DRAM, while the Samsung and SK hynix figures measure only DRAM. As it is, the memory portion alone would be 3.5 times the reported 200,000 at SK hynix’s Wuxi fab in China.

Many in the industry were skeptical when Musk announced the plans in March , but orders are now leading more companies to see a real business opportunity. The timeline is aggressive, as it usually takes three years or more to get from planning to volume at a leading-edge fab, and Terafab is targeting volume production in the second half of 2028. Procurement officials from the company reportedly visited Japan earlier this month to meet local suppliers and to work on details on bringing in equipment , with some suppliers asked to deliver within a few months.

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