Giga Austin Nexus

Overview

Three Operators, Three Counties, One Metro

Tesla Giga Texas sits on more than 2,000 acres along SH 130 in southeastern Travis County. It opened in April 2022 and builds Model Y, Cybertruck and Cybercab. Cybercab production began in April 2026, and paid Cybercab rides started in Austin on Sep 4, 2026. The Cortex 2 training cluster (more than 130,000 H100-equivalent GPUs) began ramping on the campus in early 2026, and Tesla is preparing a second-generation Optimus humanoid line there for 2027.

Samsung Taylor is Samsung Foundry's first US wafer fab, with more than $37B announced and a $4.745B CHIPS Act award. It started prototype 2nm production of Tesla AI5 in September 2026 and plans full supply in 2027, under a $16.5B Tesla contract signed in July 2025. TSMC also builds a version of AI5 on 3nm.

The SpaceX Bastrop complex east of Austin started as the Starlink kit factory. A $17.3M Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant in March 2025 backed a $280M, 400-job expansion for printed circuit boards and panel-level packaging. In June 2026 SpaceX announced an 11-million-square-foot GigaSat factory on a 1,000-acre site to build AI1 orbital compute satellites, alongside a planned 10 GW solar cell plant.

Phoenix holds TSMC Arizona and Intel, Boise holds Micron, and Hillsboro holds Intel; each is a chip cluster. The Austin metro pairs a leading-edge foundry with a vehicle and robot plant and a satellite factory.

Pages

Every Anchor Page in the Giga Austin Nexus

Supply chain

Tesla Silicon Moves Between All Three Sites

Tesla designs its AI5 and AI6 inference chips in-house. Samsung Taylor fabricates AI5 on 2nm, and the 2025 contract covers AI6 as well. Tesla broke ground in April 2026 on an Advanced Technology Fabrication research fab on the Giga Texas North Campus to develop its own process technology; the volume plant, Terafab, moves to the Gibbons Creek site in Grimes County, where Tesla and SpaceX announced a $16.8B first phase on Aug 6, 2026.

SpaceX Bastrop builds the boards and packaged silicon inside Starlink kits. The chips end up in Cybercab and Model Y vehicles, Optimus robots and Cortex clusters on the ground, and in Starlink, Starshield (SpaceX's government satellite line) and AI1 satellites in orbit.

China sits under two parts of this chain. Optimus actuators depend on rare-earth permanent magnets that China dominates; Beijing's April 2025 export licensing on magnets slowed Tesla's robot plans, and MP Materials in Fort Worth is the main Texas alternative. In orbit, Starlink and the AI1 program compete with China's Guowang and Qianfan (Thousand Sails) megaconstellations.

Location

ERCOT Power and Texas Incentives Drew All Three

ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas) runs a grid outside federal interstate transmission rules, and Texas SB 6 (2025) set its large-load interconnection rules; see ERCOT large-load interconnection. Tesla received a Chapter 313 school tax limitation and a $68M Del Valle ISD package; Samsung received Taylor and Williamson County abatements; SpaceX received the state semiconductor fund grant.

The three anchors draw on one labor market with Apple, AMD, NXP, Dell and Applied Materials, fed by UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. The corridors that connect them are SH 130 from Giga Texas north to Taylor and SH 71 east to Bastrop; see SH 130 Austin-Taylor and US 79 data center corridor.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• Tesla Giga Texas
• Samsung Taylor Fab
• Bastrop Complex
• SH 130 Austin-Taylor Corridor
• Terafab Grimes County
• Austin Supercluster