Elon Musk Says Tesla Will Build A 2-nanometer Dirty Fab Where He Can Smoke Cigars And Eat Burgers

[JohnS]

If you are familiar with the manufacturing of computer chips. you'd most likely know that the idea of smoking cigars and eating burgers in the sterile environment required to make them is pure fantasy. One could ask what Elon Musk was smoking when he came up with this, but I'm fairly confident that the answer is not a cigar...

Musk Says Tesla Will Build A 2nm Dirty Fab Where He Can Smoke Cigars And Eat Burgers

by Aaron Leong — Thursday, January 08, 2026

Semiconductor engineers everywhere are clutching their lint-free jumpsuits in horror as Elon Musk has announced his latest disruption: the "dirty fab," a chip lab so chill in its standards that you could smoke and eat a double fat cheeseburger inside.

Even as industry leaders like TSMC and Intel spend billions of dollars on ultra-pure cleanrooms where a single stray eyelash can ruin a multimillion-dollar wafer, Musk believes the future of silicon can involve a lot more grease. During a recent interview on Moonshots, the Tesla CEO laid out a vision for a 2-nanometer TeraFab that tosses the traditional rule book into the garbage can. Musk’s proposal suggests that the sterile, monastic atmosphere of modern chip manufacturing is an unnecessary "over-optimization" that hinders productivity and, more importantly, prevents workers from enjoying a decent lunch at their stations.

The dirty fab idea is basically a rejection of the ISO Class 1 environment. Normally, these facilities require air filtration systems that swap out the room's atmosphere every few seconds to prevent dust from settling on sensitive circuits. Musk, however, envisions a factory floor where employees can wander around in street clothes, perhaps sporting a few coffee stains, while tossing back cheeseburgers. He even joked about the possibility of smoking a cigar inside the facility, even if it's technically illegal to do so anyways.

Musk smoking a joint on Joe Rogan's PowerfulJRE show. (Credit:: PowefulJRE via YouTube)

 According to Musk, the justification lies in the machines themselves. He argues that instead of making the entire building a cleanroom, the "clean" part should be shrunk down to the level of the equipment.

Now, this anti-cleanroom claim, as wild as it may sound, is part of a broader bet that Tesla can revolutionize chip making just as it did with automotive assembly. By removing the massive overhead of air purification and the time-consuming process of suiting up, Musk believes he can slash the cost of chip production. It is a classic Musk gamble: either he has identified a massive efficiency that everyone else was too scared to try, or Tesla is about to produce the world’s most expensive collection of 2nm paperweights.

Nonetheless, if successful, the TeraFab could turn the semiconductor world upside down, proving that the secret to the next generation of computing wasn't air filters, but a little bit of imagination and a side of fries. But then again, Musk has been known to be wrong sometimes. 

Source: https://hothardware.com/news/musk-says-tesla-will-build-a-2nm-dirty-fab-where-he-can-smoke-cigars-and-eat-burgers

[NYGuido]

Wow. This is pretty asinine. I know almost nothing about manufacturing chips, but I do know absolute sterility is essential. 

[Ryan]

As part of a college project in 1991 I built a robot designed to clean air conditioning ducts controlled by a BBC computer. The software was largely machine code with some BBC basic. I built an interface (transistors and relays) on a pcb as controller between the computer and robot. My lecturer broke the arm on the robot on the first test in the lab, as I didn't have safeguards in the software to prevent over extension of the arm. "Fix that", he says before flicking his cigar ash on my circuit board and walking away. It was 1991 and smoking had been banned in lecture rooms and labs the year before in Ireland (it was still allowed in the hallways), but he didn't care. It was the first real world lesson I learned in software development, "If a user can do something, they will."

As for smoking in a fab lab. That's just silly. There are probably better things to spend that money on. Unless the plan is to allow chip production in countries where current fabrication lab standards cannot be met, with the wafers, and everything else important, contained and sealed during fabrication. I doubt that's the thinking though.