Musk builds chips, Zuckerberg farms cells as AI races for new means of production
The piece argues the AI race is shifting from hoarding GPUs to controlling two physical inputs: chip fabrication and biological experimental data. Musk's SpaceX and Tesla announced in August a Texas "Terafab" chip manufacturing base with $16.8 billion in first-phase investment, while Zuckerberg-backed Biohub joined an approximately $1.8 billion virtual biology initiative announced on Oct. 7 that aims to turn labs into pipelines that continuously generate training data. It also cites Anthropic's Bay Area wet lab, where Claude proposes experiments, and Danaher's plan to run its first AI autonomous research lab at scale by early 2027.
If the last race was about who had the most GPUs, this argues the next one may hinge on who controls chip fabrication capacity and experimental data.