Tesla poaches Intel expert who ramped chip production to lead its Terafab fab

Tesla has poached an engineer from Intel who was responsible for ramping chip production on the 18A process, Intel's most advanced node, as well as on 22 and 14 nanometer nodes. At Tesla, he will lead the Terafab project, which involves building a large chip manufacturing plant from scratch. CNews reported the hire.

Who moved and what he will do

• At Intel, the specialist led the production ramp of 18A, the company's most advanced process
• He was also responsible for bringing up the 22 nm and 14 nm processes
• At Tesla, he will head the Terafab project: building a chip manufacturing plant from scratch
• CNews framed the move as part of an outflow of key engineering talent from Intel to competitors

Why Tesla wants its own chip production

Tesla has spent several years investing in its own chips for Autopilot and AI training. First came the chip for its Full Self-Driving system, then the Dojo supercomputer built on Tesla's own D1 accelerators. Elon Musk has repeatedly talked about plans to expand the company's compute capacity for training AI models for autonomous driving and robotics, rather than relying entirely on third-party silicon suppliers.

Judging by the scale of the task, building a fab from scratch, Terafab implies far more capacity than Tesla's current chip lines. The hire's specific background matters: Intel is betting on 18A to win back manufacturing leadership from TSMC and Samsung. Bringing in an 18A specialist strengthens Tesla's expertise in ramping new, not-yet-mature production lines, not just in designing the chips themselves.

A difficult stretch for Intel

Intel's manufacturing business has hit a string of problems in recent years. The company trails TSMC in contract chip manufacturing market share and is investing billions of dollars in new fabs in the US. At the same time, it keeps losing experienced engineers to competitors and to customers that want to build their own production. The 18A process is supposed to be the key proof for Intel Foundry that the company can compete for orders from external customers, not just build chips for its own products. That is why the industry sees the departure of the very people who brought this process up as a particularly painful loss.

What it means

The flow of experienced leading-edge process engineers from Intel to competitors like Tesla shows that the fight for chip manufacturing talent is intensifying. More and more tech companies want to build their own fabs and AI chip lines instead of buying capacity from third-party foundries.