India, Dec. 29 -- Elon Musk has stated publicly that he will ultimately require between 100 billion and 200 billion chips per year to support the combined needs of Tesla vehicles, Optimus humanoid robots, Starlink terminals, and xAI's AI infrastructure. He has also expressed repeated frustration with the semiconductor industry's inability to expand capacity quickly, noting that new fabs can take five years or more to come online-far too slow for the pace at which his businesses are scaling.

The scale of Musk's semiconductor demand is unprecedented for a private industrial ecosystem. Tesla, Optimus, SpaceX, Starlink, and xAI together already consume more silicon than any vertically integrated company in history. Over the next five years, ...