Tesla, SpaceX and xAI are asking a federal court to declare that the name of their future Texas chip factory does not infringe on the brand of a small Illinois company.
Elon Musk's name for his semiconductor factory clashes with a much older trademark. Tera-Print, an Illinois-based company that employs eight people, owns the rights to "Tera-fab," a benchtop photolithography tool designed in the 2010s. Six conciliation meetings held between June and August 2026 did not result in any agreement, and the legal teams of Tesla, SpaceX and xAI have filed a lawsuit with federal court to find that there has been no infringement.
The argument of the three companies is based on the distance between the two uses: on the one hand, a giant semiconductor factory, on the other, a nanotechnology instrument placed on a desk, two markets where buyer confusion would be unlikely. Tera-Print argues the opposite, arguing that the names are almost identical and that the products belong to the same lithography sector.
The project at stake is on a whole new scale. Announced in March 2026 as a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, Terafab plans a hundred million square feet of production space and an initial investment of $16.8 billion in Grimes County, Texas, to manufacture the chips for autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots and orbiting computing center projects. For now, the small Illinois company will have gained visibility that it would never have obtained alone.
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