TSMC is willing to work with Elon Musk’s Terafab chip project, but any fab involved would have to be run by TSMC, chairman and chief executive C.C. Wei said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. He added that the two sides have not yet reached an agreement.
Bloomberg reported the remarks shortly after the call. A week earlier, Musk had ruled out any operating role for the Taiwanese chipmaker in a post on X, as Bloomberg also reported on 7 October.
Terafab is a joint chipmaking effort by Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Its first phase, a $16.8bn fab in Grimes County, Texas, broke ground in August and is meant to supply chips for Musk’s cars, robots, and data centres.
During the call, JPMorgan analyst Gokul Hariharan asked about a possible new cluster of TSMC fabs in Texas and any talks with Tesla or SpaceX.
In reply, Wei said large US customers had asked for more capacity, so TSMC had sent teams to Texas to look for a site beyond its existing base in Arizona.
He also confirmed that TSMC is talking to the customer building Terafab about how that capacity might be used.
Hariharan then asked whether any deal would follow the model of TSMC’s joint ventures in Japan and Germany, both of which TSMC runs.
“We are still in discussion,” Wei said. “But the fab got to be run by TSMC.”
Musk, however, wants the opposite. In his 7 October post, he wrote that Tesla and SpaceX would build and operate the plant themselves, leaving TSMC only a small opening.
“Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that,” Musk wrote.
Intel, meanwhile, remains part of the project. Its chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, told Bloomberg last week that the company would stay on Terafab, where it is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process.
The talks come as TSMC weighs a Texas campus of its own. On Thursday, it reported third-quarter revenue of $46.7bn, up 41% from a year earlier, and it expects $52.3bn to $54.3bn in the final quarter.
Wei did not give a timeline for the Terafab talks, and he said TSMC would share more once the two sides reach a firm conclusion.