The name of Elon Musk’s chip venture is being contested in court, months before the plant is due to produce anything.
Ownership of the mark is the question. A declaratory judgment request filed in a Texas federal court asks a judge to confirm that the project’s name does not infringe an earlier registration.
The companies behind the filing are Tesla, SpaceX and SpaceXAI. Their complaint runs 45 pages.
On the other side sits TERA-print, an Illinois maker of nanofabrication tools. Its TERA-FAB desktop photolithography printer has been sold to laboratories since 2021 for sensor and bioengineering work.
Paperwork tells part of the story. Three trademark applications went in during May. A cease-and-desist letter followed within days. The toolmaker had moved to widen its own registration into silicon chips, semiconductor materials and AI design services just before sending that letter, a step the complaint calls opportunistic.
By June the dispute had escalated into a threat of litigation. Six rounds of talks between June and August went nowhere, and the two sides remain far apart on whether buyers could confuse a tabletop printer with a giant fabrication plant.
The toolmaker says it has used the name for over a decade and holds a Defense Department fabrication contract. The project in Texas, priced earlier at $16.8B, is still under construction.
