Texas Startup Gravity Warps As 796B Floods Four Cities

Texas deployed 79.6 billion dollars across 284 deals in six months with an average check size three times larger than California's, and nobody's talking about it. Fort Worth is writing 710 million dollar average checks for mega-funds and continuation vehicles while San Francisco's deal count dropped 12 percent, and Dallas grew in both deal volume and size when that's not supposed to be possible. While coastal VCs fight over foundation model startups, Houston just funded 462 million into geothermal power infrastructure specifically for AI data centers because someone realized the model layer is commoditizing but energy infrastructure scales with usage.