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After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AIAmerica’s biggest companies say they might need more people after all. For months, major employers treated hiring as an expensive last resort. Now, a shift is emerging across industries. Companies ranging from railroad giant CSX to Google parent Alphabet GOOGL have told investors in recent days that they plan to hire to meet growth goals or to seize on emerging technologies.The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing...

Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is supercharging an already massive US investment spree – pledging an additional $100 billion to meet surging AI demand. The move brings TSMC’s investment in the US to $265 billion and comes as the company posted second-quarter earnings that blew past market expectations Thursday. TSMC, which supplies powerful chips that are critical for tech giants like Apple and Nvidia, boosted its global capital spending plan for 2025 to between $60 billion and $64 billion. That record level marks an increase of about 7% to 14% from its previous forecast. Still, TSMC’s US-listed shares slipped...

Two rural school districts have advanced plans for $1.66 billion in tax breaks for SpaceX's proposed chipmaking facility outside of College Station.Anderson-Shiro CISD and Iola ISD approved the SpaceX incentives during their separate meetings Tuesday night. The school boards will vote again after the agreements are finalized and approved by SpaceX and the state. Last month, Grimes County also agreed to waive its portion of the company's property taxes.The chipmaking facility, dubbed Terafab, is expected to employ more than 3,000 people. It would build chips for broadband internet satellites and the data centers that SpaceX founder Elon Musk wants to...

Starfall?! Most Tesla investors have never heard of it. But this quiet SpaceX project could be one of the biggest tailwinds for TSLA in the 2030s and beyond. It is not just "another capsule." It is a 10 feet diameter, 2.5 feet tall disk-shaped, reentry vehicle designed to bring high-value payloads back from orbit safely and affordably. It weighs about 4,600lbs and is the missing piece for in-space manufacturing at scale. The first FAA-approved launch test is scheduled for June 21st 2026. Starfall’s sole purpose is to be a rapid point-to-point cargo delivery vessel. It unlocks commercial in-space manufacturing by...

In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more. Elon Musk -- "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space" | 2:49:45 Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe | 1,628,229 views | February 5, 2026

"The super-factory will alter everyday life. If it actually happens. The announcement of Terafab was made at a decommissioned power plant, reflecting Elon Musk’s understanding of stagecraft: The ruined infrastructure of one era makes a convenient altar for the next. On March 21 and 22, 2026, at the Seaholm Power Plant in Austin, Musk presented Terafab. It is either the most ambitious semiconductor manufacturing project in history or a very expensive project that may not come to be. Terafab is a plan to build vertically integrated chip-manufacturing capacity in Austin, combining under one roof the design, fabrication, packaging, and testing...

It's a ~24-minute video that primarily consists of a transcript/narration of a major speech by Elon Musk. In it, Musk announces a massive collaborative project between SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla to build what's called a "Terafab" — an unprecedented advanced chip fabrication facility (described as "the most epic chip building exercise in history"). Key points from the announcement: The goal is to produce 1 terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) of compute capacity per year, combined with terawatt-scale solar power — much of it deployed in space. This is framed as essential to advance humanity on the Kardashev scale (toward Type 1 civilization...