Here's a number that should stop you mid-scroll: SpaceX is planning to spend at least $55 billion on a single chip factory in Austin, Texas — and that's just the opening act. If all planned phases get built out, the total bill could hit $119 billion. That's not a typo.
The project, called Terafab, surfaced in a public hearing notice filed in Grimes County, Texas, where SpaceX was requesting tax breaks for the facility. Tax abatement filings are usually dry bureaucratic paperwork. This one quietly revealed one of the most ambitious manufacturing bets in recent memory.
When Elon Musk first floated the idea back in March, he sketched out a vision that sounded more like science fiction than a construction permit. The plant, he claimed, would eventually produce enough chips to support 200 gigawatts of computing power annually here on Earth, and up to one terawatt for space-based systems. For context, a single gigawatt can power roughly 750,000 American homes. Musk is talking about chips that could power small countries — from orbit.
Terafab will be jointly operated by SpaceX and Tesla, with chips earmarked for AI workloads, robotics, and those ambitious space-based data centers Musk keeps referencing. Intel is already on board as a design and fabrication partner, announcing last month that its chip-building capabilities would help Terafab hit that one-terawatt-per-year production target.
This matters beyond the sheer scale of the dollar figures. Right now, the AI industry runs almost entirely on Nvidia's GPUs. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have poured billions into developing their own custom silicon precisely because dependence on a single supplier is a strategic vulnerability. SpaceX entering the chip manufacturing space — with this kind of capital commitment — signals that Musk is betting he can build his way out of that bottleneck entirely.
It also connects to something SpaceX is already doing. The company operates a data center called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, which recently inked a deal to power Anthropic's AI models. So the infrastructure ambition is real and already generating revenue. Terafab would just be the manufacturing backbone behind all of it.
The skeptic's take is worth holding onto, though. Chip fabrication is extraordinarily hard. TSMC took decades to reach its current dominance. Intel spent years and tens of billions trying to close the gap and is still catching up. Announcing a $119 billion factory and actually delivering cutting-edge chips at scale are very different propositions. SpaceX has a track record of doing things the aerospace industry said couldn't be done cheaply or quickly. Whether that translates to semiconductors is the real question.
SECURITY
ShinyHunters Takes Canvas Down After Massive Student Data Breach
Imagine logging into your school's learning platform to submit an assignment and instead getting a ransom note. That's exactly what happened to students across thousands of institutions Thursday, when Canvas — the learning management system used by universities and K-12 schools worldwide — went dark after hackers seized control of the login screen to deliver a very public threat.
The group behind it, ShinyHunters, isn't new to this. They've previously claimed responsibility for breaches at Ticketmaster, AT&T, Rockstar Games, ADT, and developer platform Vercel. These aren't opportunistic script kiddies — ShinyHunters has a consistent track record of high-profile attacks and, apparently, patience.
The message students encountered was blunt. ShinyHunters claimed they had breached Canvas's parent company, Instructure, and accused the company of ignoring their outreach and quietly pushing security patches instead of negotiating. The group set a deadline of May 12, 2026, for affected schools to contact them privately, threatening to leak all stolen data if no deal was reached.
What makes this particularly alarming is the scale. According to Bleeping Computer, ShinyHunters' data leak site references 9,000 schools and claims to hold data on 275 million students, teachers, and staff. That figure is staggering — it would represent a meaningful chunk of every person who has ever touched a Canvas-connected institution. The compromised data reportedly includes student names, email addresses, ID numbers, and private messages.
Instructure confirmed the breach last week and said it had deployed patches to improve security. The timing here is worth noting: the company apparently knew about the intrusion, applied fixes, and did not take the system offline. ShinyHunters interpreted that response as being ignored, which is likely what triggered Thursday's very visible escalation.
Canvas is one of the two or three dominant learning management systems in higher education. When it goes down, it doesn't just inconvenience students — it disrupts finals, assignment submissions, grade postings, and faculty communications simultaneously across thousands of campuses. The operational damage compounds quickly.
For schools, this raises an uncomfortable question about vendor accountability. Institutions hand over enormous amounts of sensitive student data to third-party platforms with the assumption that those platforms are taking security seriously. A breach of this magnitude, followed by a public ransomware spectacle, is exactly the kind of event that forces IT administrators and procurement teams to rethink how much trust they extend to centralized edtech providers.
Canvas's status page confirmed that Canvas, Canvas Beta, and Canvas Test were all unavailable as of Thursday, with the company still investigating. Whether Instructure engages with ShinyHunters' demands or calls their bluff will determine what happens to that data — and how this very bad week gets resolved.
Source: The Verge
The group behind it, ShinyHunters, isn't new to this. They've previously claimed responsibility for breaches at Ticketmaster, AT&T, Rockstar Games, ADT, and developer platform Vercel. These aren't opportunistic script kiddies — ShinyHunters has a consistent track record of high-profile attacks and, apparently, patience.
The message students encountered was blunt. ShinyHunters claimed they had breached Canvas's parent company, Instructure, and accused the company of ignoring their outreach and quietly pushing security patches instead of negotiating. The group set a deadline of May 12, 2026, for affected schools to contact them privately, threatening to leak all stolen data if no deal was reached.
What makes this particularly alarming is the scale. According to Bleeping Computer, ShinyHunters' data leak site references 9,000 schools and claims to hold data on 275 million students, teachers, and staff. That figure is staggering — it would represent a meaningful chunk of every person who has ever touched a Canvas-connected institution. The compromised data reportedly includes student names, email addresses, ID numbers, and private messages.
Instructure confirmed the breach last week and said it had deployed patches to improve security. The timing here is worth noting: the company apparently knew about the intrusion, applied fixes, and did not take the system offline. ShinyHunters interpreted that response as being ignored, which is likely what triggered Thursday's very visible escalation.
Canvas is one of the two or three dominant learning management systems in higher education. When it goes down, it doesn't just inconvenience students — it disrupts finals, assignment submissions, grade postings, and faculty communications simultaneously across thousands of campuses. The operational damage compounds quickly.
For schools, this raises an uncomfortable question about vendor accountability. Institutions hand over enormous amounts of sensitive student data to third-party platforms with the assumption that those platforms are taking security seriously. A breach of this magnitude, followed by a public ransomware spectacle, is exactly the kind of event that forces IT administrators and procurement teams to rethink how much trust they extend to centralized edtech providers.
Canvas's status page confirmed that Canvas, Canvas Beta, and Canvas Test were all unavailable as of Thursday, with the company still investigating. Whether Instructure engages with ShinyHunters' demands or calls their bluff will determine what happens to that data — and how this very bad week gets resolved.
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