Elon Musk lands in Austin the night he unveils a $25B chip fab

Elon Musk flew from Hawthorne Municipal Airport in Los Angeles County to Austin on Sunday night, a 2-hour 15-minute trip in his Gulfstream G650ER, N628TS, that touched down just before 3 AM local time. The flight arrived roughly eight hours after Musk wrapped up a live event at the historic Seaholm Power Plant in downtown Austin, where he announced a joint semiconductor venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI.

The $20–25 billion Terafab facility, reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by multiple outlets, will be built on Tesla’s existing Austin campus and targets 2-nanometer chip production. Musk told the audience that existing suppliers—Samsung, TSMC, and Micron—were expanding too slowly for his companies’ needs, according to Fortune and Axios. Around 80% of the fab’s compute output is earmarked for orbital AI satellites, pending FCC approval of SpaceX’s application for one million data-center satellites.

The Sunday night arrival from Hawthorne fits a pattern of short-haul hops between Musk’s California engineering hubs and his Texas home base. The same G650ER logged four flights between Hawthorne, Brownsville, and the Bay Area in the days preceding the Terafab event, suggesting a week of cross-country coordination across Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI operations.