When Elon Musk took the stage on Saturday to unveil his plans to get into semiconductor production, he didn’t spare the superlatives. No one has ever proposed anything quite like what Musk calls Terafab. The project, as outlined, would be a massive operation to build cutting-edge semiconductors for artificial intelligence, robotics and space forays. He would not only try to take on the best chip manufacturer in the world — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — he wants to do it at volumes far beyond the industry’s current capacity. The scale boggles the mind. The project would require something like $5 trillion to $13 trillion in capital spending, according to estimates from Bernstein analysts. That would fund 140 to 360 new factories, each making 50,000 wafers per month in order to reach the 1 terawatt of annual computing capacity he proposed.

Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Businessweek Senior Reporter, discusses how Musk, by far the richest person in the world, has accomplished what others believed impossible before — creating a commercially viable rocket business with SpaceX, bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream with Tesla Inc., and delivering internet connectivity from space with Starlink.

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