Elon Musk says SpaceX and Tesla will remain TSMC customers, questions terafab scale

Musk’s message

Elon Musk wrote on X this morning that SpaceX and Tesla will “always” be customers of TSMC (台积电), not competitors in the conventional sense. Short and blunt. He was commenting on remarks by TSMC CEO C.C. Wei (魏哲家) from a recent earnings call, and warned that TSMC could not be expected to produce the “staggering number” of chips implied by Musk’s own factory plans.

TSMC’s stance and timelines

C.C. Wei reportedly told investors that there are no shortcuts in the foundry business: building a new fab takes two to three years, and scaling up capacity another one to two years. Wei emphasized technology leadership, manufacturing excellence and customer trust as the fundamentals — echoing a familiar refrain in the chip industry where process nodes and yield matter as much as ambition. Intel and Tesla were named as customers and competitors; Wei said he would not underestimate Intel’s strength.

Terafab details and claims

It has been reported that Musk announced a joint “Terafab” project for SpaceX and Tesla in March, aiming to integrate 2nm logic, memory and advanced packaging on a single campus with an annual target of roughly 100 billion to 200 billion chips. Those numbers and technical ambitions are ambitious — and reportedly the reason Musk pressed the point about TSMC’s capacity limits. The specifics remain Musk’s projection rather than an independently verified production plan.

Strategic implications

Why does this matter to Western readers? TSMC sits at the heart of global semiconductor supply chains and its capacity constraints have geopolitical significance amid U.S. export controls and growing tech decoupling between Beijing and Washington. Can a private, vertically integrated “Terafab” leapfrog that industrial and regulatory complexity? Musk’s rhetoric raises the question — but for now, TSMC’s timeline and the hard reality of fab economics remain the limiting factors.