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Intel has been struggling in recent years, but it still has a number of fabrication plants around the world and decades of experience. Musk will have to license that manufacturing know-how. According to Moorhead, that means Intel will likely own the intellectual property produced at the Terafab. Musk would be able to create his own “recipe” for chip manufacturing, but until his companies are in a place to buy up their own chip-making equipment—such as advanced lithography machines—he will still be licensing a manufacturing process or special-process design kit from another foundry.

Intel’s public statement about the mash-up with Musk is almost comically vague. The company said that its “ability to design, fabricate, and package ultrahigh-performance chips at scale” will help accelerate Terafab’s goal of producing 1 terawatt of computing power a year to support “future advances in AI and robotics.” Pat Moorhead, a longtime chip-industry analyst and founder of Moor Insights & Strategy, predicts that Musk will lean on Intel for its advanced packaging capabilities to start. He notes that Tesla “doesn’t need [chip] design engineering; they’re already very capable of that.” Mo

Hard to say. Neither Intel nor Tesla has filed any paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is typically required if a new partnership or deal materially changes the capital investment or manufacturing capacity of a public company. For example, when chipmaker AMD and Meta announced a “multiyear, multi-generation” partnership in February to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs for Meta’s AI services, AMD disclosed the deal in an SEC filing. As of publishing, no such forms have been filed yet by Intel or Tesla. That indicates Tan and Musk’s agreement may be mostly handshak