Musk wants to build a $20 billion factory. Collaboration with Intel is also possible.

Elon Musk, at Tesla's annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas , announced that the company must build its own semiconductor gigafactory to meet the needs of its ongoing and planned AI and robotics projects.

Tesla is no longer just an electric car factory

In line with its adopted strategy, Tesla is slowly ceasing to be a company producing electric cars and battery systems, and is increasingly transforming into a research and production center in the field of new technologies.

"With artificial intelligence and robotics, you can actually grow the global economy tenfold, maybe even a hundredfold. There's really no clear limit (...) That's why one of the things I'm seriously considering is the lack of enough chips," Tesla CEO Elon Musk said.

Currently, the company uses supplies of chips produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and South Korea's Samsung Electronics .

The initial production capacity of the new factory, which will most likely be located in the United States, will reach 100,000 semiconductor wafers per month, increasing to 1 million per month over time.

While Tesla doesn't manufacture chips itself, it does have a research and design team that develops custom chips for autonomous vehicles and Grok.

Elon Musk is focusing on the production of next-generation chips

Elon Musk's declaration is clear: "We want to design a new chip ourselves that will consume 1/3 of the energy compared to Nvidia's Blackwell with comparable performance at 10% of the cost."

Tesla estimates that, depending on the projected production volume, the cost of the new "Terra Fab" will range from $10 to $20 billion. Collaboration with Intel and jointly implementing the investment project are also possible.