Tesla and SpaceX are jointly building TERAFAB, an AI chip fabrication facility in Austin, Texas, with Intel as the manufacturing partner. Tesla's $25 billion 2026 capital expenditure — roughly three times what it spent last year — funds the project. The goal is to produce chips for Optimus robots and Full Self-Driving inference in-house, replacing Nvidia purchases.

The Signal  — Apple's shift from Intel chips to its own M1 in 2020 changed the economics of hardware permanently. Tesla is betting the same logic applies to AI inference at scale. If TERAFAB works, Tesla controls its chip supply chain through 2030 and beyond. If it doesn't, $25 billion sits in Austin. What to watch: This is Part 1 of a 7-part series tracking Elon's interplanetary stack. Watch whether Intel holds up as the manufacturing partner — and whether TSMC gets cut out entirely.

OpenAI opened free ChatGPT access to verified U.S. clinicians — doctors, nurses, and pharmacists — starting April 22. The program removes the $20/month cost barrier and covers drafting clinical notes, summarizing research, and explaining diagnoses in plain language. The move follows Google's competing push to embed AI into hospital workflows.

The Signal  — Healthcare is one of the last major professional verticals where AI adoption stalled partly on cost. Removing the subscription fee for hundreds of thousands of clinicians is a distribution move, not a product launch — and it's how OpenAI wins the clinical workflow race before Google does. What to watch: Many hospitals maintain blanket bans on patient data entering commercial AI tools. Free access doesn't change those policies, and how clinicians navigate that friction will define actual adoption rates.

SpaceX negotiated a $60 billion acquisition option for Cursor, the AI coding assistant popular with developers and engineers. The deal includes a $10 billion exit clause — SpaceX pays that amount if it decides not to complete the purchase. The Wall Street Journal first reported the terms, confirmed by multiple parties.

The Signal  — A $10 billion walk-away fee is not a sign of uncertainty. It's a signal that SpaceX considers letting a competitor own Cursor to be worth $10 billion to prevent. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all competing for control of the tools developers use daily — whoever owns that layer owns the development stack for the next decade. What to watch: Whether Cursor's research team stays post-acquisition matters as much as the price. The best coding AI tools depend on research velocity — and that lives in the people, not the product.