Elon Musk visits Intel’s largest manufacturing hub, posts photo with CEO Lip-Bu Tan: What makes this important

Tech billionaire Elon Musk made a high-profile visit to Intel’s massive manufacturing and R&D hub in Oregon, signaling a deepening alliance between the chipmaker and Musk’s empire of companies. This tour comes on the heels of major wins for Intel, including a reported deal with Apple and a formal partnership with Musk’s SpaceX, Tesla and xAI to build “Terafab” – a semiconductor project of unprecedented scale.During his visit to the facility, which is Intel’s largest hub with over 22,000 employees, Musk met with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. He also posted a photo where both the chief executives are holding a bust of what appears to be Tesla’s Optimus robot. "It was an honor to be shown the awesome@Intel fab in Oregon this week. Looking forward to a great partnership with @SpaceX & @Tesla!" Musk said in a post.The core of the Intel-Musk partnership revolves around Terafab, a joint venture between Tesla and SpaceX. Musk has described the project as a “gigafactory, but way bigger,” designed to solve a shortage of high-performance hardware. Intel will provide its expertise in design and fabrication to help Terafab reach a staggering goal: producing 1 Terawatt (TW) of computing power per year. For Musk, building the Terafab is a matter of necessity. “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips,” Musk told investors, noting that even the best-case production scenarios from current suppliers would not meet his companies' future demands.For Intel, the partnership is a major validation of its Foundry business. By securing Musk as a key partner and potential customer for its 14A and 18A nodes, Intel is positioning itself at the very center of the global AI and robotics revolution.Intel’s Oregon fab manufactures chips with the 18A process, which is a cutting-edge node currently producing “Panther Lake” CPUs. Plans are already in place for xAI to leverage Intel’s future 14A process technology for its next generation of artificial intelligence chips. The Oregon fab also serves as the primary site for Intel’s most sophisticated chip design and packaging.