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Elon Musk unveils moonshot Terafab project. Here are 4 takeaways.

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Elon Musk unveiled more details on his Terafab plans on Saturday evening — and the Tesla CEO has an ambitious vision for the project.

“We’re starting a galactic civilization,” Musk said, speaking from the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in Austin.

The Terafab is Musk’s giant chip manufacturing venture between his companies, Tesla and SpaceX. XAI is also included as the AI startup was acquired by Musk’s space company in February.

The idea of developing a chip manufacturing plant alone is “herculean,” as Morgan Stanley’s semiconductor analysts wrote in a recent note. The amount of money it would take, along with the technical know-how and specialized tools required, is why the industry is split into fabless designers like Nvidia and foundries like TSMC.

Musk said on Saturday that the Terafab is not only necessary to scale robotaxis and Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, but also to deploy space-based compute. The CEO said the fab will develop chips “designed for space” in order to deploy solar-powered AI satellites.

Here are some takeaways from the announcement.

An all-in-one chip plant

Musk said the Terafab will be a comprehensive plant that will have all the necessary equipment to test, revise, and manufacture the chip.

The CEO is essentially proposing to put some of the validation stages of chip development that are typically done outside a fab plant under one roof.

“To the best of my knowledge, this doesn’t exist anywhere in the world where you’ve got everything necessary to build logic, memory, and do packaging, and test it, and then do masks, improve the masks, and keep looping it,” Musk said.

2 kinds of chips

There will be two kinds of chips the Terafab will make, according to Musk.

One will be designed primarily for Optimus and Tesla’s vehicles, which are being built and trained to be fully autonomous. Musk said the chip will “especially” be for Optimus because he expects the volume of units to be 10 to 100 times more than the volume of cars.

The other chip, called D3, will be specialized for space environments. The CEO said he expects most of the data centers to be housed in lower orbit, requiring the need for a solar-powered AI satellite.

Musk said the cost of deploying AI in space will drop “below the cost of terrestrial AI” in part because space is always sunny, giving way to more power.

“So as soon as the cost to orbit drops to a low number, it immediately makes extremely compelling sense to put AI in space,” he said. “It becomes a no-brainer, basically.”

Mini AI satellites

Part of Musk’s vision for a distributed AI computing network lies in space.

He revealed a concept design of a mini AI satellite, with each one attached with solar power to deliver 100 KW power capacity.

In the future, Musk predicted that satellites would reach the megawatt range.

The CEO said these satellites are ideal because no one wants AI computing centers “in their backyard.”

Petawatts and other moonshots

Musk proposed that in the future, his companies could establish an industrial base on the moon.

That will unlock the ability to create petawatts of AI compute — 1,000 times more than a single terawatt, he said.

The CEO also envisioned free trips to Saturn in a post-scarcity economy where everything is free.

Musk acknowledged the outlandish nature of his “abundance” proposal: “This looks a bit like the opening of Idiocracy with Mike Judge.”




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Some Amazon employees get ‘Project Dawn’ calendar invitation discussing upcoming job cuts

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Some Amazon employees got a worrying calendar invitation on Tuesday, stoking more concern about job cuts that are expected in coming days.

The invitation addressed impending job cuts and mentioned “Project Dawn,” an initiative to improve efficiency at Amazon, according to a copy obtained by Business Insider.

The invitation had the subject line “Send Project Dawn email” and was written by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of AWS Solutions, although it appears to have been sent by an assistant.

The invitation was for a calendar event at 5 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, but it was canceled shortly after it was sent. Some employees noticed it and shared the information with Business Insider.

“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the accompanying message read. “The notifications to impacted colleagues in our organization who are based in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica have now been completed.”

“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey’s message continued. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”

Amazon plans to cut thousands of corporate roles in coming days, Business Insider previously reported. The reductions would mark the company’s second round of mass layoffs since October, when it eliminated roughly 14,000 jobs. An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

After the calendar invitation landed, confusion spread across an internal Slack channel with more than 36,000 Amazon employees, according to messages viewed by Business Insider. Staff questioned whether the message had been intended for Aubrey’s entire organization or only for those whose roles were being eliminated.

“Am I impacted or sent by mistake to all?” one employee wrote.

Others saw the email as confirmation that the expected layoffs were imminent.

“Well, if you needed solid proof that tomorrow is legit, the project dawn email is it,” one person wrote. “Looks like they wanted to use AI to send an email tomorrow and instead it sent a calendar invite today.”

It remains unclear which teams will be affected by the cuts. Some Amazon employees who spoke to Business Insider theorized that staff who received the accidental invitation may not be among those getting cut.

“People are speculating you’re safe if invited,” one employee said.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at ekim@businessinsider.com or Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 650-942-3061. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

Contact this reporter via email at astewart@businessinsider.com or Signal at +1-425-344-8242. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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ICE arrested 2 truck drivers heading to a major Meta data center project

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  • ICE arrested two drivers on Wednesday near a Meta construction project in Louisiana, officials said.
  • The individuals were detained during a traffic stop inspection of vehicles heading to the site.
  • “ICE did not enter the Meta site at any time,” the local sheriff’s office said.

Meta’s new mega data center project had a brush with immigration authorities.

The Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana’s Richland Parish, where the massive Hyperion Data Center is under construction, said Wednesday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained two dump truck drivers traveling to the site during a traffic stop inspection.

“During those stops, two drivers were arrested by ICE due to their immigration status,” the office said. The drivers were from Guatemala and Honduras.

“ICE did not enter the Meta site at any time,” the office said.

In a statement to Business Insider late Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE did not target a Meta data center in Louisiana.

The DHS spokesperson said that the ICE agents had carried out a “targeted operation” to arrest the truck driver from Honduras, and had encountered another driver from Guatemala. It said both were arrested and are in ICE custody.

Meta declined to comment to Business Insider.

The Meta project is the largest of several multi-gigawatt data centers that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said will come online as the company races to catch up on AI computing capacity.

Wednesday’s arrests crystallize an issue that companies have increasingly had to grapple with over the past year: how to prepare workers for an ICE encounter, whether on or off company property.

The action also follows a recent surge of ICE activity in cities and towns across the US, which has met some resistance in Democratic-led states.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has been a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The state is receiving nearly $1 million a month to house detainees at its Angola prison, Axios reported, citing public records.

January 15, 11.25 p.m. E.T. — This story was updated to include comments from a DHS spokesperson.




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