🚀Musk's New $25B 'Terafab' AI Chip Project
Elon Musk just unveiled Terafab, a new Tesla-SpaceX-xAI chip facility that aims to produce a terawatt of AI compute per year, or roughly 50x what the entire world outputs today — calling it "the most epic chip building exercise in history by far."
- —Musk's Austin facility would handle logic, memory, packaging, and testing, a vertical integration he said exists nowhere else
- —Two chip types are planned: one for Tesla vehicles and Optimus robots, another space-grade chip for solar-powered AI satellites launched via Starship
- —Musk said "no one wants AI computing centers in their backyard", expecting space-based compute to undercut ground costs within 2-3 years
- —The Terafab is pitched as the first step towards a "galactic civilization", with a post-scarcity economy that provides "abundance for everyone"
Why it matters: Building a fab on this scale from scratch is an enormous bet, but the need for AI chip scaling is a real one — and Musk has made a career out of ignoring what the industry says can't be done.
💡The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI Use Cases
The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.
- —Darren, Director of Media: For a recent video, he needed to animate a visual representation of an ancient board game. Doing that manually in After Effects would've taken hours, so he described the rules to Claude and asked it to generate an interactive SVG animation. After a few rounds of tweaking, he screen-recorded the result and it worked great for the video
- —Jennifer, Tech & Robotics writer: When her sixth-grade daughter needs math help, she sometimes feels lost herself. She uses ChatGPT to walk through problems step by step — in French, since that's how her daughter learns — so she can actually explain them in a way that makes sense
Why it matters: AI is transforming creative production and educational tutoring, finding applications from professional video production to homework assistance.
🎨Use Google Stitch to Redesign Your Entire Website
In this guide, you will learn how to use Google Stitch to redesign an existing web page by uploading screenshots. This is a very fast way to fix weak layouts, generate better variations, and create something you can hand off to a developer.
- —Step one: Pick a single page on your website that needs improvement. Take a screenshot and think about the specifics of what needs to be changed
- —Step two: Go to Google Stitch, add the screenshot in chat, and prompt: "Improve the layout of this page so the user sees more content and perceives more value. Make the content more accessible and reduce the dead space"
- —Step three: Select the generated page > Generate > Variations > Generate Variations to have four new page concepts. Choose the best one, and go to More > Export
- —Step four: Once you export the design to Figma or download the new code, you can rinse and repeat this process with as many pages as you like in the same canvas
Why it matters: Click Export > AI Studio to build a live prototype with Google's vibe coding tool.
🐮Halter's AI 'Cowgorithm' Nears $2B Valuation
New Zealand's Halter is reportedly nearing a new round led by Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund that would value the startup at $2B — with its 'Cowgorithm' collars using AI in agriculture to track, herd, and modernize pasture management.
- —Halter's solar-powered collars create virtual fences and let ranchers herd cattle remotely via app using vibration and audio cues
- —Collars send 6,000+ data points per minute to Halter's proprietary AI, which it calls the 'Cowgorithm', to track health and optimize grazing
- —The round would double Halter's valuation from roughly $1B after a $100M raise last June, with investor demand leaving the deal oversubscribed
- —Founded on a 300-cow NZ dairy farm, Halter has collected 7B+ hours of animal behavior data and is now expanding into the US market
Why it matters: Some of the biggest AI unlocks might be coming in industries that haven't materially changed in centuries. Halter replaces physical fences, manual herd checks, and more with real-time data, a collar, and an app — bringing practical modernization to an old-school process. Plus, 'Cowgorithm' is an excellent name.