Elon Musk wants to build what he calls the largest building on Earth in Grimes County, Texas β a 100 million-square-foot semiconductor factory called Terafab β and residents of the rural county between Austin and Houston are organizing against it.
Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO, announced the project on social media earlier this month, calling it “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” according to Realtor.com’s reporting. Terafab is designed to manufacture chips for Musk’s self-driving cars and Optimus robots and, per a tax abatement agreement the company signed with Grimes County, will also include natural gas-fired power plants and AI facilities tied to the manufacturing process.
Musk has described the complex as roughly equivalent to 2,300 football fields β more than 900 times the footprint of a typical big-box retail store. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott praised the project as a “significant expansion” of Musk’s presence in the state and touted its promise of about 3,000 jobs for the county, which has a population of roughly 30,000.
Grimes County, located about 100 miles east of Austin and 70 miles northwest of Houston, has drawn organized local opposition since word of the project spread. Marie Egyed, who moved to the county from Houston eight years ago, formed the Grimes County Citizens for Responsible Development after learning about the plans at a local council meeting in March. The group has drafted a 12-point initiative seeking “absolute, measurable protections” on issues including water use, emergency services, road infrastructure and the county’s legal representation in negotiations with large developers.
“We’re not going to stop it. But maybe we can minimize the negative impact,” Egyed said. “We are going into an era where the corporations are more powerful than the government. We are seeing that transition right now.”
Some residents are already deciding to leave. Danny Cross, who has lived in the county for 22 years on a 31-acre property bordering the Terafab site, told local station KBTX that he and his wife have decided to sell their home. “We were building what we thought was our forever house,” Cross said. “Money doesn’t replace that, those memories, you know?”
Egyed said the broader worry among neighbors is less about stopping the project than managing its side effects β construction traffic, road wear, an influx of workers and new commercial development to serve them, and the possibility that rising costs will push out longtime residents. “What about our dreams?” she said. “We saved up our entire lives to buy this property out here to live out in the country.”
What it means: Musk’s own social media claims about the project’s size and ambitions are his characterization, not independently verified engineering specifications, though the scale is corroborated by the tax abatement filing with Grimes County. The community’s objections and Cross’s decision to sell are also verified β attributed directly to named residents, not secondhand accounts. Notably, Gov. Abbott’s public embrace of Terafab came the same week he halted new data center approvals statewide and called for an audit of data centers’ impact on the Texas power grid, an apparent tension between courting large industrial projects and managing their strain on infrastructure that RealtyWire has not seen him publicly address.
The standoff in Grimes County fits a broader pattern of data center and industrial-scale development drawing pushback from host communities and statehouses nationwide, even as governors like Abbott have separately pressed cities to approve more housing construction. Musk already has a substantial footprint in Texas, including SpaceX’s testing site in Boca Chica β where residents have separately sued over rocket-launch damage to their homes β Tesla’s Austin headquarters, and the Bastrop-based Boring Company.
