3,000 permanent jobs are now on the table at the Elon Musk largest building project, as SpaceX and Terafab moved the JETI agreements into active status and told Grimes County residents the chip plant is heading toward construction. For people in Anderson, the next phase is no longer a paper exercise: civil work and foundations are next, and the first phase already carries a workforce plan that reaches well beyond the factory floor.
Riley Trennell on the timeline
3,000 permanent jobs are part of phase one at Terafab, Riley Trennell said in the Grimes County Commissioners Court room on Wednesday morning. He said the jobs will span food service, janitorial services, security, and semiconductor fabrication engineering, a mix that shows the project is being built as a full operating site rather than a narrow assembly line. “These jobs span the full range of jobs that exist,” he said.
Within days, he said, renderings of the facility could be released. Within months, construction could begin. Trennell said the project will move nearly immediately to civil work and foundations: “Now with the JETI done, we are going to be moving nearly immediately to get going on the project. We need to get our civil work started. We need to start to get foundations in place. And we’re going to get cracking,” he said.
JETI agreements turn active
Active JETI agreements are the practical switch that turns the project from approval to execution. SpaceX, the local school districts, and the Governor signed off on the agreements before the meeting, and that status was in place when the representatives sat down with residents in Anderson, Texas. For residents who had spent months with questions about the proposed facility, the face-to-face meeting provided the first direct public explanation of how the project now advances.
Thousands of construction jobs are expected during the build-out, giving the project a short-term labor footprint that is separate from the 3,000 permanent positions planned for phase one. Trennell also said the Gibbons Creek Reservoir site is the best solution SpaceX has found for the project, adding that there is no perfect place in the U.S. to build it.
Houston to the Texas Triangle
7.2 million people live less than an hour away from the site, and 15.9 million live within three hours, Trennell said as part of the case for locating the facility in Grimes County. That access helps explain why the project is being sold as more than a local plant: it is being described as a semiconductor base with reach across Texas and the broader Texas Triangle, while Jordan Buss cast it in strategic terms.
Jordan Buss, SpaceX Environment, Health, Safety and Medical Lead, said, “Terafab is not just a business that’s coming into the community. This is something that is strategically vital for the United States and for Western civilization.” He also said America has a growing reliance on foreign-made chips and compared the shortage risk to COVID-era shortages, putting the project in the frame of supply resilience as well as local payrolls.
The next material checkpoint is the design itself: renderings could land within days, and the first dirt work could follow within months. Until then, the numbers residents have to work with are already clear — 3,000 permanent jobs in phase one, thousands more during construction, and a site that SpaceX says is ready to move from agreement to ground work.
