Chip-equipment makers could benefit from Musk's plan to manufacture his own chips, analysts say - but the venture is still heavy on hype and light on specifics

Semiconductor-equipment stocks have been hot artificial-intelligence plays this year, and now there could be another catalyst in store.

Analysts say that shares of chip-equipment makers are among the biggest potential beneficiaries of Elon Musk's ambitious plan to manufacture his own chips. To achieve Musk's vision, Tesla Motors and SpaceX will have to spend a ton of money. The major question now is how realistic Musk's venture is.

Musk announced Saturday that he plans to build a "Terafab" facility in Austin, Texas, which will produce chips for Tesla vehicles and robots as well as space-based data centers, as he looks to scale up to 1 terawatt of compute power per year. The fab is expected to produce everything needed for advanced chips, including logic and memory components and packaging technologies.

Mizuho trading-desk analyst Jordan Klein thinks Dutch chip-equipment manufacturer ASML Holding NV would be a key beneficiary of the Terafab project and from Musk's general plan to produce more chips. Since the Terafab would produce leading-edge chips, Klein said in a Monday note that it would therefore need ASML's extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines for manufacturing chips beyond the 2-nanometer process.

Wafer-fab-equipment maker KLA-Tencor could also benefit from the Terafab efforts, he said, as the company offers advanced metrology systems that are used for design verification and for monitoring high-volume chip-manufacturing processes.

The venture would also presumably need equipment for etching and deposition, which are manufacturing and packaging processes. That would help Applied Materials, Lam Research, TE Connectivity and possibly Teradyne, Klein added.

One terawatt of compute is about 50 times the 20 gigawatts of global compute supply available today, according to Musk. From doing some "very rough back-of-the-envelope" math, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said that could require between $5 trillion and $13 trillion in capital spending on wafers for different types of chips, such as high-bandwidth memory.

Klein said questions remain over what the funding and timing will look like for the Terafab. Just the shell of the fab could take about two to three years to build, he noted.

"Musk has to get the funding and a lot of it," Klein said, pointing to the SpaceX initial public offering that is expected later this year.

Still, Klein cautioned that investors should wait for more Terafab details to be finalized and shared before they get too excited about potential winners from the project.

He views the Terafab as "another potential call option for upside to [wafer-fab equipment]" in the next three years and beyond. Many broader chip-equipment stocks have already staged notable gains so far this year - with Teradyne's 57% rally ranking first in the PHLX Semiconductor Index, and Applied Materials' 41% gain ranking fourth.

Bernstein's Rasgon shared a similar view to Klein, writing in a Monday note that the Terafab announcement currently doesn't mean "all that much beyond the hype." For believers in Musk, however, "you would want to buy semicap," he said.

Musk's plan to build his own chips might come off as a negative for incumbent chip makers, he added - but "in a world where compute is this strong, any player is going to see far more upside than they could ever handle."