Guess I can kill this.
Check, check, check.
Nine.
That's from the phone.
That's from the nine choos.
Okay, nine choos.
Okay, nine.
Chess is gay nines.
Chess is game nines.
Chest chest.
Chip.
Chiek, check, che when I was preparing when I was preparing
I just visualized was ET.
So ET going across the moon, you know, with a boy on the bicycle and a contraption to communicate to call home.
Obviously.
Predecessor to Starlink.
So I guess that didn't work.
So so so Elon has uses a principle you know first principles about everything should be done the right way, not the fastest way, not the quickest way, not the cheapest way, the best way.
And everything looks at all over again.
So if someone makes an investment on his behalf for one of his businesses,
it's always viewed in the terms of is this the best we can do?
Best we can do, the fastest we can do, the most effective.
So so one thing I would say is that he's a builder.
He's probably the only builder I'm aware of in the United States who builds stuff.
But builds stuff that's not just regular stuff, like ten million square foot buildings, five million, twenty million.
Now he's got a hundred million square foot building for terapab that he's thinking about or going
to build and and and so the question and no one else has done this no one and anything like it and so the question is of course and when you're doing such a thing then you get scaling benefits you get to buy things produce things much more effectively than you could
if you were in a smaller entity so the question is how do you manage to do this and why didn't anyone else ever try to do anything like this we're trying to get silicon to come back to the United States
Again, we need it, we need power, we need silicon.
No one's doing this except for you.
How come?
Well, that's actually that's not quite accurate in that TSMC and Samsung are building fabs in the US.
So TSMC is building a large collection of fabs in Arizona, and some of them are, I believe, operational.
And Samsung has some operational fabs in Texas and is is building, or has built, I should say, a fab for Tesla that will be dedicated.
To the AI-5 and AI-6 chip designs that Tesla's done.
So, but relative to what's being done in Asia, the amount of chip application in the US is very small.
And even if you take the best case assumptions of all the chip fabs that that have been announced that will be built in America, that's still a tiny fraction, perhaps on the order of 10%, optimistically 10% of what's in Asia.
So as I think most people know, Taiwan does an incredible amount of heavy lifting on chip production.
TSMC is an amazing company, truly incredible.
The sheer number of a variety of chips and the magnitude and the volume is incredible.
That TSCMTC does.
Same thing for Samsung.
And I think Micron does a great job too on the memory side.
So but the but it's overwhelmingly built.
Asia.
So my concern really is that there is always like some geopolitical risk in that region.
And I think that that risk may come to fruition at some point, in which case if we don't have all the pieces necessary to build chips at scale in America, then we may not have any chips at all.
Or very few, the 10% number type.
thing.
And then there's the the the maybe looking ahead you know past any sort of medium-term geopolitical bumps in the road.
Even if you if you exclude geopolitical crisis issues, the rate at which we're making chips is simply too slow.
So if if you if you want to get to say a terawatt a year of chip production, which is our goal, that's
That's the reason it's called the terapab.
It's sometimes people, when I say terapav, there's you know three possible meanings to terapab.
One is terror, t-e-r-r or
which I think sometimes people are like, why would you want a terrafab?
and then there's tera, which just means earth, but it's actually t-e-r-a, as in terawat.
so but arguably all three apply.
So
It's terrifyingly large.
difficulty breathing.
So so the rest of the world is making we'll make this year around twenty gigawatts of AI chips, maybe twenty-five.
and then next year, depending on who whose projections you believe, it's maybe around thirty-five to forty five gigawatts of AI chips next year.
and but but if if
Want to do a a terawatt, that's now you need you need 30 times so good what current global production will be roughly next year.
For just stock.
We're building that for us.
Stock pot?
Well, yes, we're building.
I mean, we can tell it to other people too, but basically, we're building 30 times what the annual production is in one plant.
What you think is going to do as value as big a production as the GDP in the world, as a GDP for the 20th lowest.
Yeah.
So no no obviously you know a a plan like this I think if it fails it'll be crazy.
If it succeeds it'll be audacious.
Look at that.
so it it sort of depends on the outcome.
But I I think it will succeed at least to some degree.
so yeah.
Yeah, I mean it's gonna cost a trillion dollars.
Problem other than that.
but we won't need that money immediately.
We'll be building faces.
and and we are looking at ways to change the manufacturing process for for chips to improve the efficiency of of chip production as we've done in m many other arenas.
like just one example, like like right now, the amount of time that a wafer in
Chip app spends simply being transported and waiting is more than half the time.
So more than half of what a chip is doing in a chip app is nothing.
It's either being moved around or waiting for a machine.
So and and I think there's basically a lot of a lot of potential for improvement in chip fabrication.
Why don't these people do it themselves?
If they're if they have plans just
Sit with chips half the time just not moving.
What's to stop them from improving their own systems?
Well no, actually if you if you visit a chap a fab, you'll see that the the the the fat the the the wafers are moving, they're zipping all over the place.
and and waiting.
But but but the the amount of time that the atoms are being changed on the wafer in a way that is useful is a is a is less than half the time.
and I'd say sometimes it's maybe twenty percent of the time that that that something
Useful is happening to the atoms on that wafer.
The reason that they don't want to try something adventurous or or with chip apps is that these things cost a tremendous amount of capital.
And if they have a recipe that works, they just they simply don't want to risk something new.
So generally the preference in the chip industry is to repeat what they did last time with.
Minor changes and and not take any risks.
So we we we're building a research chip fab in Texas, just in Austin, at the at Giga Factory, Texas.
That research fab is going to try many different approaches to chip fabrication.
and and many of those approaches won't work, but some of them I'm sure will work.
And then we will translate those.
improvements to the the Terra Fab itself, the production Terra Fab, which is in Grimes County in Texas, near Texas AM.
and and that's that's that's where we'll scale up production of our AI chips.
the I I think we we the one of the things that's gonna be interesting about the research fab in Austin is that under one roof we will have the ability to make d a do do logic memory packaging
And do the lithography
so that we can have we can design new chips and and in under one roof make the make the whole chip test it make the whole chip test it with a very fast iteration cycle.
Something that would normally take a year.
I think we we we may be able to reduce to a month.
So if if for any given technology endeavor, the
The pace of progress is determined by how many iter how many iterations can you do and how much progress can you make between those iterations.
So if you if you can improve the speed of iteration and the and the r and like how how many iterations can you do per year or per unit time, and the progress between each iteration, in any given technology, you will you will accelerate your progress at a rate far greater than anyone else.
If you if you are a hit, you know, if you if you're able to
Iterate an order order of magnitude faster, you as a first approximation will advance your technology of order of magnitude faster.
So most people are there's a tremendous amount of inertia in business because if someone makes an effort to spend money and it's not successful, then that's a black mark on them.
And if it is successful and they're trying to get the top job of the business, then it just means that they have to work.
Harder.
So if they're successful, they work harder, and if it's if it fails, they're finished for their opportunity for the top job.
Elon has established a culture in his business, business is, where it's always about come to me with ideas, and then if it's successful, if you think it's successful, and I believe that's the case, then we'll throw away what we've done before and start all over again.
It's always about doing the best thing.
One of the things that's
Interesting to me about your culture is that you introduced me to Key Key Luck, the person who's in charge, Intel, who's now going to be have an interest in Terrafab.
And so I spent some time with him and he comes to visit me and I said, So so what's it like to work with Elon?
He says, Well, other people come to visit my facility in Oregon, and they come and they walk around for an hour and
Half and they leave, and Elon comes and then he sits there, he was there for four and a half hours, and he interviews one engineer after another after another after another, questioning everything.
That's the whole concept.
So everything that he has to do is speed.
And then when I went to Texas to Boca Chica to visit their car factory that they were building there, they introduced while it was under construction, they introduced me to the head of that facility, the manager, giant man.
And and of course everyone seems like a giant to me, but he was a he was a really giant guy.
And he had been previously the head of production at Ford.
And so I said, Well, so what's it like, difference between Ford and Tesla?
He said, Well, when I was at Ford and I had a change, I had to go through six different levels to get a change approved.
When I have to have a change here, then all I do is walk upstairs and there's Elon.
And so when a plant is something under construction, Elon's not
Some distant guy, he's there.
He even has an airstream.
He lives in an airstream.
Do you know any other executives of any big companies, potentially the largest company in the world, going to live in an airstream to make sure that all the questions that are taking place in making a facility are going to be answered fast.
So, you know, it's an amazing culture, amazing person, that and amazing people who's recruited.
So this whole people who work there, they're just brilliant people.
It's like harder to get a job there than get into Harbor.
Of course I don't know why people would go to Harbor anyway anymore.
Yeah.
Well by the way, S-streams are actually pretty nice, so I wouldn't say I'm like No, it's not that bad, honestly.
I don't I kinda like my little air stream.
but it's it's it's it's it's pot it's it's actually parked right next to the power plant.
that we we so we built this power plant that's producing over a gigawatt.
and probably it'll you know go to one and a half to two gigawatts over.
Internal power pamp production in about a fifth of the time that such a thing would normally be built.
So built in about a year as opposed to normally be about five years for that.
And it's not it's not as though somebody has to come to me upstairs.
There is no upstairs, so we have no other floor in in the at our Memphis Colossus II thing.
I I walk I walk the entire site sometimes t two, sometimes three, sometimes four or five times a day.
So
the entire site, the power plant and all the buildings.
and I also insist on doing at least some of the work myself manually.
So so I've like I've pulled power cables the size of a an Anaconda.
Like they're incredibly heavy and long.
And I've I've done the fiber optic cabling.
I I've done electrical switches
I've worked on the on the power plant management software.
It's so that it I I I try to do at least a little bit of everything so that I'm not numb to the pain of the people who are actually doing it.
I have some understanding of the difficulty and what can be done to improve the situation.
so it's not as though I'm sitting in an office and somebody has to come to me, I'm walking the floor, asking them questions actively.
274 company 74 VMA Medical, 100 mail, 170.
So let's talk a little bit about data centers, which are now in the news and people.
Yeah, popular topic.
Yeah, I'd say.
so so it but but
but if you want to have AI, you've got to have data centers.
And so let's talk about them first on this
planet.
So so Elon believed that the the roadblock would be in the way of Didis
No line has that.
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