Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, claims his Gigafactory in the Nevada Desert will one day be the world's largest building. The facility already measures an impressive 5.3 million square feet and is apparently only 30% complete. Whether it overtakes the current recordholder, the 18.9 million square-foot Global Centre in China, remains to be seen. Producing everything from airplanes to underwear, read on to see the staggering size of the biggest factories in the world right now.

Located in the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is the tallest single-story structure in the world. It stands at 525 feet tall and was built in 1966 to assemble the Apollo/Saturn V moon rocket.

To this day, the VAB is the only building in which people have assembled a rocket that's carried humans to the surface of the moon. Today, the factory hosts the Orion spacecraft that will be used in Artemis I, an upcoming mission that aims to explore the moon and Mars. The VAB is also home to the largest-ever American flag. The 209-feet-tall, 110-feet-wide patriotic banner is painted on the outside of the building. 

Measuring roughly five football fields long and two wide, you might assume this factory produces cars, planes, or spacecraft. In fact, the Lauma Fabrics factory in Latvia makes something much smaller: underwear. 

Established in 1969, Lauma Fabrics is Europe’s leading fabric manufacturer. As well as underwear, the factory also makes medical products such as elastic bandages and compression stockings under the brand name Lauma Medical.

The Jean-Luc Lagardère Plant in Toulouse-Blagnac, France is the assembly hall and ground test site for the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft. An estimated 50,000 metric tons of steel were used to construct the factory, which opened in 2004. 

With a volume of 1.5 billion gallons, the Jean-Luc Lagardère Plant also boasts a restaurant, salons, fluid and energy production plant, and even a congress center. 

The 3.5 million square-foot Belvidere Assembly Plant is located in Illinois. The factory currently manufactures the Cherokee Jeep but was built in 1965 to assemble the Chrysler C platform vehicles. In 2006, it became the first Chrysler plant to have a body shop operated solely by robotics, with 780 robots on the factory floor. 

The plant has been in operation since 1965 but has repeatedly shut down production this year due to shortages of microchips and semiconductors.

Just outside Seattle, the Boeing Everett Factory manufactures the Boeing 767, 747, 777, and 787 Dreamliner aircraft. Construction of the facility began in 1966 to meet the demand for 747s, after Pan American Airways ordered $525 million-worth of the craft. In today's money, that's the equivalent of $4.3 billion. 

The plant, which employees around 30,000 people across 4.2 million square feet, houses an exhibition room, restaurants, coffee shops, a fire station, theater, and a general store.

Austal USA is the American branch of an Australian shipbuilding company. Although the firm also has locations in Vietnam and the Philippines, this Alabama-based factory is the firm's biggest facility, occupying a 5 million square-foot plot of land.

Austal USA assembles commercial ships such as ferries and cruise liners. Despite its Australian ownership, the plant also has special dispensation to work independently on sensitive projects such as combat vessels for the US navy. 

The Gigafactory isn't Tesla's only ambitious facility. The Tesla Fremont Factory in California has 5.3 million square feet of space to produce the Model S, Model X, and Model 3 Tesla vehicles. Between 1962 and 1982, the factory was home to General Motors before being used by Toyota from 1984 to 2009. Tesla bought and remodeled the enormous building in 2010. 

The Tesla Fremont Factory features an employee training center, gym, 24/7 in-house medical center, cafeteria, and outdoor patios. It currently employs 10,000 staff, but Elon Musk plans to double the facility's size to 10 million square feet in the coming years, a move that's likely to create thousands of new jobs. 

Gigafactory comes from the word “giga”, the unit of measurement representing billions. Tesla's gigafactory, located in the Nevada desert, produces Model 3 Tesla cars and lithium-ion batteries, a key component of electric vehicles. The factory has a footprint of 1.9 million square feet with 5.3 million square feet of operational space across several floors. 

If the Tesla Gigafactory is only 30% complete as claimed, it could measure around 18 million square feet upon completion. Tesla claims the building was built "out of necessity" to support the company's aim to produce 500,000 cars a year. According to Global Trade, experts have suggested that building lithium-ion battery plants in the US could help American manufacturers stop relying on exports from China, which has a "stronghold" on the industry. By producing batteries on site in Nevada, Tesla may be able to avoid a critical lack of materials that could bring its production lines to a halt. 

Established in the city of Hwaseong in South Korea in 1990, this is the largest Kia car manufacturing plant in the world. The automobile company owns 13 other facilities across the globe and currently produces around two million vehicles a year. 

The Kia Hwaseong Plant, also known as the Namyang Design Center, serves as the focal point for all Kia's engineering activities. These include design, prototyping, track testing, crash testing, and full-scale wind tunnel aerodynamic testing. The building is more than 150 times larger than the Kia Design Center in America, which reportedly measures 239,000 square feet. 

Located in the city of Ulsan, South Korea, this enormous factory is the main production site for car manufacturer Hyundai. The company owns five different manufacturing plants in total. Between them, they take up as much space as 700 football pitches and churn out a new car every 10 seconds, according to Auto Express. 

The mammoth Ulsan factory employs 34,000 staff and produces around 5,600 cars every day. It comes equipped with its own port, fire station, and even a hospital. 

The Wolfsburg Plant is the global headquarters of German car company Volkswagen. Measuring a staggering 700 million square feet, it currently produces 11 different models of car. Until September 2021, the plant also produced the Volkswagen currywurst, a branded sausage that was sold in the factory's 17 different restaurants. Volkswagen is replacing the sausage with meat-free alternatives in a bid to lower its carbon footprint. 

The Wolfsburg Plant has produced over 40 million cars since 1938 and currently employs around 65,000 people (30 of which worked solely on the sausages). It boasts the largest state-of-the-art paint shop in Europe and was the first car factory to use eco-friendly water-based paint. Fancy a closer look? Volkswagen offer tours of the Wolfsburg Plant between Tuesdays and Fridays; perfect for motorheads and meat-free sausage lovers alike. 

The real owners of these world-famous brands might surprise you