Tesla and SpaceX confirmed Thursday that they will jointly build a massive semiconductor manufacturing facility called Terafab in Grimes County, Texas, with an initial investment of $16.8 billion for a project the companies say will become the largest and most valuable building on Earth.

The facility will be located roughly 70 miles northwest of Houston, in a rural stretch of Grimes County east of College Station, according to multiple outlets covering the announcement. Elon Musk, who serves as chief executive of both Tesla and SpaceX, described the scale of the planned building in a post on the social platform X. "Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far. And it will be stunningly beautiful," Musk wrote.

According to figures shared by SpaceX and Tesla, the completed facility is planned to span more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space, a footprint more than five times larger than the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, which currently holds the record as the world's largest building at approximately 18.9 million square feet, according to Fortune. The Terafab campus is also expected to be more than twice the size of Tesla's existing 2,500-acre Gigafactory site outside Austin, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

SpaceX described the strategic rationale behind the project in a statement posted to its website. "The facility will be an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand of the future," the statement read. The company further explained that the combined chip demand from Tesla and SpaceX alone........

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