Terafab, we have a problem.
When Elon Musk announced plans for what he said would be the world’s biggest-ever semiconductor plant, he dubbed it Terafab. Now SpaceX, Tesla Inc. and SpaceXAI are suing an Illinois company over the name.
Tera-print, a tech startup in Skokie, Ill., manufactures nanofabrication instruments it calls Tera-Fab — and has had a trademark on that name since 2017.
The Musk-led companies sued in federal court in Austin alleging Tera-print has been threatening them since May over their use of their version of the name.
Tuesday’s filing is one of at least two associated with Terafab. Musk’s companies earlier sued the state and Grimes County to keep them from releasing information about public funding and county and state tax breaks for the first phase of the project.
Their suit against Tera-print says the Illinois company sent a cease-and-desist letter in May, shortly after Tesla filed for its own trademark for its version of the name. The Musk companies said Tera-print claimed that naming their new Texas factory Terafab would cause consumer confusion with its Tera-Fab trademark, which covers specialized lithography instruments and printing arrays.
Tesla and SpaceX said in the complaint that the chances of confusion are “vanishingly small” because Tera-print operates in a separate product sphere focused on specialized laboratory research including bioengineering, microfluidics, sensing and electronics.
“The parties’ marks arise in different commercial contexts, address different customers, concern different technologies, and point to vastly different undertakings,” they said.
The Texas companies said Tera-print applied for another trademark in August in an attempt to expand its use of TeraFab to the semiconductor and AI arenas. They said the suit was filed after Tesla and SpaceX filed their trademark application and negotiations to settle the matter had broken down.
The Illinois company did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk’s Terafab is intended to become the backbone of production for chips designed to power the tech mogul’s future endeavors, from robots and rocket ships to taxicabs. The chips are also to be used in the solar-powered orbiting data centers Musk has said are a solution to the problems the sprawling centers are facing on Earth, where their thirst for cooling water and hunger for electricity have put them in the crosshairs for neighbors and elected officials.
Tesla and SpaceX are asking for a declaratory judgment and jury trial to find it is not violating Tera-print’s trademark with its use of Terafab. The suit is filed in the Austin division of the Western District of Texas.