Grimes County, Texas / the Terafab chip plant
A living reservoir, and the plant that would drink it down
Watch what a SpaceX, Tesla, and Intel megafab could take from Gibbons Creek. Move the controls, or press play to run a year and see the water rise and fall.
One leading fab draws about 200 MW. Terafab spans four phases, so full build is plausibly in the gigawatts.
The site's water rights permit consuming up to 3.2 billion gallons a year, removed and not returned.
SpaceX plans to run off-grid on its own gas plants. More gas means more smoke over the water.
Cuts the stream feeding the lake. Watch the water drop and the shoreline appear.
Why a tool, not one number. SpaceX has not published the plant's power or water specs. Controls tagged known come from public records; those tagged estimated are modeled from comparable fabs. The honest answer is a range.
One year at these settings
What the plant would demand
Power for 1.22 million homes, more than the whole county.
Like 1.29 million more cars, beside the reservoir.
4,848 Olympic pools, from a lake holding about 8.5 billion gallons.
The lake's yearly ledger
What comes in, what goes out
Billion gallons a year. Storage and the consumption cap are documented; inflow and evaporation are regional estimates, so read the balance as illustrative.
Annual water budget
In and out, billion gallons
Net change per year
Roughly break-even in a normal year. Almost no margin is left for the towns and ranches that also draw on this water.
For scale
Measured against the real world
Electrical load vs. other fabs
Megawatts of continuous power
Carbon, counted in cars
A year of CO2, as equivalent cars on the road
What flows downstream
Forever chemicals in the water
Chip making uses PFAS, which ordinary treatment does not remove. These levels come from testing at other U.S. fabs.
Bars scaled by log of concentration so both are visible. The real gap is far wider.
about 19,000x
over the drinking-water limit. PFAS last for decades, and standard plants do not remove them. Terafab will run its own treatment, but advanced PFAS removal is expensive and not publicly promised.
Life in the footprint
The habitat this would reshape
The reservoir is a real fishery and a stop on a migration corridor, and the river it feeds is home to species already protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Texas fawnsfoot
Truncilla macrodon
A freshwater mussel that lives in the Navasota River, the very river Gibbons Creek feeds. It is harmed by exactly what this plant adds: less flow, warmer, dirtier water. Mussels filter the river, so losing them is a warning for the whole system.
Navasota ladies'-tresses
Spiranthes parksii
A small orchid whose entire world range is this pocket of Texas, including Grimes County. It grows in openings of post oak woodland on sandy soil beside seasonal streams, the same ground the plant would clear.
Wildlife of the reservoir and its banks
Bald eagle
Winters here, hunts the fishery
Great blue heron
Stalks the shallows and reeds
Largemouth bass
Trophy fish, up to 16 pounds
White-tailed deer
Common in the post oak woods
Beaver
Engineers of creek and shoreline
Osprey
The fish hawk, dives for bass
What is on the land
Illustrative mix of habitat types in the footprint
At the current settings, the reservoir sits near full, so shoreline habitat holds. Raise consumption or drought and the water drops, exposing the banks these animals depend on.
How to read this. Known values (reservoir storage of about 8.5 billion gallons, the 3.2 billion gallon yearly consumption cap, the 680,000 gallon-per-minute withdrawal right, the off-grid gas plan, and the species listings) come from Grimes County agreements, TCEQ water-rights records reported by KBTX, the Texas Water Development Board, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Estimated values (electrical load, CO2, homes and cars, inflow, evaporation, PFAS levels) are modeled from comparable facilities such as TSMC Arizona and Intel Ohio and from standard factors. They show a plausible range and are not official figures for this project.
Companion report: the fully cited written review contains all sources and an expanded habitat and ecology section.