Tesla to Spend $3 Billion on Chip Fab, Taps Intel for Support

Elon Musk

Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg

Tesla Inc. plans to spend roughly $3 billion to build a research chip factory in Texas, according to Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, an early phase of an effort to establish chip manufacturing at a massive scale.

The research facility will be built on the electric-vehicle maker’s existing Giga Texas campus, Musk said Wednesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call. It will be capable of outputting just a few thousand wafers a month but intended to be a testing ground for new technologies and processes.