The Austin Daily News

In this week's issue: SpaceX filing for a June IPO at up to $2 trillion — and viral back-of-envelope math says hundreds of Austin employees are about to get generationally rich An Austin drone-defense startup that kills threats for $10 a pop just saw its valuation jump 14x to $2 billion, and Ted Cruz showed up at their office the day before A man barricaded under Highway 71 throwing debris at cars while SWAT scrambled — welcome to Austin infrastructure hour APD officers reportedly telling a resident not to film an aggressive homeless man yelling death threats, because filming is "provoking" Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: Six APD teams launching daily encampment sweeps on May 11 — but only a few dozen shelter beds exist citywide SpaceX files the first hard site notice for TERAFAB: $55-119 billion, Grimes County, June 3 public hearing Amazon's data center subsidiary quietly closes on Bastrop County land while the city bonds $1.18 billion to nearly double airport capacity The IHOP at Cesar Chavez and I-35 finally sold — six years of legal theater, ending in a $5,000 margin bidding war Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: 410 gigawatts of data center power requests queued up in Texas — and a radical private-capital fix that could cut the line entirely Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet rolling unsupervised after dark for the first time, while the Cybercab comes off the Giga Texas line A Cinco de Mayo restaurant shooting that left one dead and four injured, and Austin's 28th fatal crash of 2026 on South Lamar Tom Segura opens an Italian bakery with a former Italian Navy SEAL, because this is Austin and nothing makes sense in the best way Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: Dell's board just voted unanimously to bring the company's legal home back to Texas — the kid who started it in a UT dorm room is completing the circle A Cedar Park rocket company is now in the same room as Lockheed and Raytheon competing for Trump's $185 billion Golden Dome missile defense program Texas set a national record: 274,183 families applied for school choice vouchers in the program's very first year Austin's crime and public safety crisis is getting worse and harder to ignore — the numbers don't lie ACL Fest 2026 lineup drops this morning at 9 AM — 25 years of the best music festival in America Rock and roll.

In this week's issue: The Texas AI data center gold rush is separating real money from vapor — one company just crashed 86% from a $12B+ valuation Austin Energy is a government monopoly hiding in your electric bill — and most residents have no idea ARM is reportedly in talks to join TERAFAB's R&D initiative, and the Austin Business Journal has sources ACL Fest 2026 drops its lineup tomorrow morning Rock and roll.

In this week's issue: Austin's $5.3B humanoid robot company just hired the people who deployed self-driving cars at scale — and a new robot is coming Spirit Airlines is dead, 17,000 jobs gone, and the Biden DOJ killed it — here's what Austin travelers need to do right now Five people from Amarillo's pickleball club killed in a fiery plane crash near Wimberley, headed to a tournament in New Braunfels It's Gary Clark Jr. Day in Austin, the whole month of May at Antone's is sold out, and there's a free merch pop-up happening right now Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: Elon Musk admitting under oath that xAI used OpenAI's own models to build Grok — while simultaneously suing OpenAI for $130 billion The U.S. Army proposing a 3-gigawatt data center at Fort Bliss that would consume more electricity than all of El Paso Five Austin council members lining up to kill $142 million in IT savings while the city stares at a $26 million deficit Infowars physically locked and dark after 27 years in Austin Rock and roll.

In this week's issue: Elon Musk's $20-25 billion chip factory — the most audacious infrastructure bet in Austin's history The deregulation data is in: HOME-built homes selling at 53% below traditional new construction Samsung's Taylor fab installs EUV equipment — first chips rolling this year, with a $16.5B Tesla deal anchoring the line David Allan Coe, the outlaw's outlaw, is dead at 86 — and what he built without a single institution behind him Rock and roll.

In this week's issue: A man with 33 prior Travis County charges — including 3 aggravated robberies — murdered a 35-year-old woman, and Jose Garza's office declined to prosecute him. He's free. Oracle executed the largest layoff in its 47-year history right here at its Lady Bird Lake campus — 20,000 to 30,000 jobs vaporized in a single 6 AM email — while simultaneously committing $156 billion to AI infrastructure A Meow Wolf co-founder is building a "neuroscience bathhouse" steps from Barton Springs, and guests will wear EKG monitors while soaking Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi count in Austin just hit 19 — and the community trackers are adding new vehicles faster than Tesla is announcing them Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: Texas's $10 billion hemp industry just won a temporary courtroom reprieve — but the Friday enforcement deadline is still ticking, and the state's lawyers tried to kick the cameras out Two former Bitcoin mines in West Texas converting to AI data centers with a combined 3.1 gigawatts of planned capacity, and one just delivered its first live data hall to CoreWeave A physical altercation outside Sam's BBQ became East Austin's second six-person shooting in a single weekend — one suspect arrested, zero excuses left Kelly Slater's celebrity wave pool hit $4.6 million in contractor liens and construction has stopped — McConaughey, Tony Hawk, and Drew Brees each dropped $1.25M to get in $51 billion in state property tax relief and Austin homeowners somehow ended up with zero net relief Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: The kid who built chips in his parents' garage is now moving a 120,000 sq ft semiconductor company — co-founded with the most important chip architect of the last 30 years — to Austin Waymo blocked an ambulance during a mass shooting, then declined to show up to a public safety meeting about it A congressional candidate's video of a Sunday night East Austin shooting went viral with 268,000 views — and the city's soft-on-crime leadership is getting the blame Austin has $90M worth of bridges falling apart and a city government budgeting $4M a year to fix them Texas is moving. Let's go.

In this week's issue: An Austin startup suing a YC-backed San Francisco 21-year-old for faking credentials, infiltrating their product, and then marketing the stolen UI as "vibe coded" Over $1 billion in voter-approved Austin bond projects sitting unbuilt since 2006 — and Watson wants more money in November Congregation Beth Israel vandalized with a swastika for the second time in five years, while APD has no arrests Lammes Candies — Austin since 1885, five generations, the first neon sign in this city — is closing its stores Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet: 15-20 cars, 10 months in — the number serious investors actually need Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: A 26-year-old Duke dropout raised $20M at a $100M valuation from Bill Ackman, Josh Kushner, and the Coinbase co-founder — to build nuclear reactors and cargo drones in a Lockhart trailer park 40 miles from Austin Austin just posted record VC numbers and simultaneously landed at #24 on the best-cities-for-startups ranking — while Florida cities swept the entire top five Clarence Thomas walked into UT Austin and called progressivism an existential threat to the Declaration of Independence, to its face A viral 405K-view video shows Austin influencers paying a homeless man to drink until he cracked his head on the sidewalk — Reddit banned it, X didn't Aman — the world's most exclusive hotel brand — passed on Wyoming and Montana and chose Texas Hill Country instead Let's ride.

In this week's issue: The Abbott/Austin ICE standoff is over — and Austin was the last Texas city to fold A nearly $1 billion hotel and convention center is coming to the COTA corridor A Pflugerville chip company just landed $4.83M in state money and is hiring 250 people Someone got arrested for climbing I-35 near Rainey Street and ripping stoplights off the infrastructure Texas doesn't wait for anyone. Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: - Tesla engineered the Cybercab to meet all federal safety standards without a single waiver — meaning the 2,500-unit annual cap that cages every other autonomous vehicle maker simply does not apply, and volume production is running right now at Giga Texas - Governor Abbott's deadline came and went, Dallas folded, Houston folded, and Austin is now the last major Texas city in the state still stalling on ICE compliance — with up to $20 million on the line - A Stuttgart phot

In this week's issue: - Michael Dell just wrote a $750M check to build America's first AI-native hospital — in Austin, the largest U.S. city that somehow didn't have a real academic medical center until now - Firefly Aerospace already landed on the moon, and now they're building a 144,000-square-foot campus in Cedar Park — five times their old footprint - Tesla's Q1 earnings are in, and Austin is the only fully-unsupervised robotaxi market on Earth — no safety driver, no supervisor, just the ca

In this week's issue: - Austin's $7.1 billion transit project just got stabbed in the back by Texas's own senator — and the plan has been cut in half since voters approved it - A $27M foreclosure auction on a prime downtown IHOP parcel that may be the most valuable undeveloped land in the entire city - Michael and Susan Dell just became UT Austin's first billion-dollar donors — with an AI-native hospital to prove it - Tesla robotaxis are no longer just an Austin thing Let's ride.

In this week's issue: - Austin home prices just hit their lowest point since March 2021 — and pending sales are surging 11%, which means the floor may already be behind us - A Facebook group and one hostile city bureaucrat killed a 70-megawatt data center in Hutto — here's how NIMBY organizing is quietly blocking Texas's AI future - Tesla's robotaxi just expanded to Dallas and Houston, making Texas home to three simultaneous robotaxi cities at $2.73 a mile — four days before Q1 earnings - Austi

In today's issue: - Tesla's Cortex 2.0 AI supercomputer is firing up at Giga Texas this month — 500 MW of proprietary compute, Megapack capacity doubling, and a 10-million-unit-per-year Optimus factory going up next door - Samsung's Taylor fab holds its equipment move-in ceremony Thursday — the moment a $16.5B chip deal and years of construction delays turn into an actual working semiconductor factory - Tesla's unsupervised robotaxis just landed in Dallas and Houston simultaneously, with Housto

In this week's issue: - Tesla robotaxi expands from Austin to Dallas and Houston — fully unsupervised from day one, no safety driver, no apology - A Travis County judge who had three documented chances to lock up a violent repeat offender before he got behind the wheel drunk, coked up, and careless — and killed a 26-year-old UT engineer at a red light - xAI quietly moves into 112,000 square feet at the Seaholm Power Plant — the exact building where Musk announced TERAFAB two months ago - Govern

In this week's issue: - Austin's own Environmental Commission moves to kill data centers inside city limits — while a $200M project just got murdered by Hutto NIMBYs with a procedural trick from the Texas code - Elon Musk's Austin empire going from blueprints to bulldozers simultaneously at Seaholm Power Plant and Giga Texas - Downtown Austin could legally hit 1,200 feet — thanks to a state law, not city hall - Six dedicated encampment sweep teams are finally launching, driven by 775 monthly 31

In this week's issue: - Abbott's April 23 ultimatum clock is ticking — $2.5M in grants gone, repaid within 30 days, if Austin doesn't reverse its APD-ICE policy by next Wednesday - Austin startups just raised $4.2 billion in a single quarter — on pace to double the city's all-time annual record - A proposal that would let downtown Austin go 1,200 feet into the sky, more than tripling the current cap - 12 driverless Tesla Model Ys loose on Austin streets, 20 camping tickets written since October

In this week's issue: - Texas just beat Massachusetts in venture capital for the first time in recorded history — and the Boston Globe had to break the news - Austin's homeless crisis hits a new low: a knife-wielding man menacing children in a park for days while 911 and 311 both refused to respond - Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet: zero new crashes since January, with full unsupervised deployment potentially weeks away - Black's Barbecue — est. 1932 — just bought the old Trudy's property near UT

In this week's issue: - Giga Texas is running three simultaneous mega-construction projects right now — Cybercab production ramp, Cortex 2.0 AI supercomputer, and an Optimus robot factory — all at once, all in Austin - A UT Austin spinout just raised $520M on top of $415M to become a top-5 humanoid robotics company globally by valuation - Austin city officials handed out propane tanks to homeless encampments — 430 fires later, someone should probably be fired - The Austin city council missed a

In this week's issue: - Pew Charitable Trusts confirms Austin rents fell faster than every other major U.S. city — here's exactly what deregulation did - Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi fleet hit a new confirmed high, and a Deutsche Bank analyst just called the ride "impressive and seamless" - Austin's transit agency tried to spend $47 million on luxury downtown office views while the city cuts services — the mayor shut it down - The city is finally deploying a permanent, full-time homeless camp

In this week's issue: - A mob of 12 attacked two gun store employees outside a bar on East 7th Street — one drew his legal firearm, stopped the threat, and is now charged with murder while the mob walks free - Austin median rent has fallen to $1,296 — below the national average — and a Pew study explains exactly which deregulation moves made it happen - Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan shook hands with Musk, Intel stock jumped 8%, and Terafab is now officially real with two Austin fabs and a specific chip

In this week's issue: - SpaceX quietly installing chip equipment 30 miles outside Austin — and it's not the Terafab you heard about in March - Austin's CISO fired amid an IT scandal that touches Dallas, $210M in annual overspend, and a City Council that just made it harder to track lobbyists - A Friday night homicide outside an East Austin cocktail bar — Austin's 20th of 2026 - An AI that legally owns a lobster restaurant in Austin, with human employees reporting to it Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: - Tesla invested $6 billion and beat every job target — Travis County said the paperwork was wrong and withheld millions anyway - A Texas judge hit pause on the smokeable hemp ban after state agencies rewrote the law without asking the legislature - An 18-year-old AI founder couldn't raise money in Jacksonville, moved to Austin, and closed $250K in a matter of weeks - Austin upzoned its neighborhoods to allow three housing units per lot — then heritage tree rules quietly b

In this week's issue: - 60 Cybercabs sitting in the Giga Texas outbound lot — and Deutsche Bank just rode one for 40 minutes and $17.35 - A mentally ill vagrant with 10 prior dismissed charges put a 62-year-old library reader in the ICU — and DA Garza's office called incarceration "ineffective" - Austin's CISO was secretly running an LLC while guarding the city's entire cybersecurity infrastructure - Austin billionaires and Musk-network attorneys quietly buying Congress to keep AI unregulated

In this week's issue: - Elderly injury offenses in Austin hit an all-time high in 2025 — more than 4x the 2014 level — and the people responsible are named Garza (both of them) - Intel just joined Musk's Terafab chip moonshot, and the deal is bigger than it sounds - Travis County handed Tesla 91% of its tax rebates and withheld the rest over paperwork — while Giga Texas shed 22% of its workforce - Austin's zoning reforms unlocked ~120,000 new homes and rents actually came down — turns out abund

In this week's issue: - Intel just answered the biggest question about Terafab — and it changes everything about how Musk's $25B chip factory actually gets built - Austin produced the steepest rent decline of any major US city, and the skyline comparison to San Francisco is genuinely embarrassing for the coastal model - A UT engineering student built the most comprehensive AV tracking platform in Austin using a traffic cam pipeline — 7 million rows of data, in his spare time - 22% of Tesla's Au

In this week's issue: - A city internal review found Austin's $25M arts grant contract riddled with unverifiable documentation, zero performance metrics, and the same failures auditors flagged in 2002 — and 2011, and 2012, and 2018 - Tesla's Cybercab just rolled into volume production at Giga Texas, Austin is now the manufacturing capital of the autonomous vehicle revolution, and the program lead just walked out the door - Katz's Never Kloses — the legendary 24-hour deli that fed Austin's night

In this week's issue: - A $2 billion AI data center deal in West Texas just vaporized — and what CoreWeave did next changes how the whole sector finances itself - Dan Patrick wants Texas to hold bitcoin as a state asset and ban Kalshi as gambling, in the same breath - Tesla robotaxi crossed the Colorado River into downtown Austin for the first time — but the viral "94 vehicles" number is a lie - Austin Energy is routing money out the door while hiking your property taxes in a market that's alre

In this week's issue: - Austin just birthed its biggest venture round ever — $1.75 billion for a drone-boat company building the Navy's future fleet - Waymo's software recall failed, kids are still getting endangered at school bus stops, and the NTSB is now watching - Austin hit #1 GDP among large U.S. metros — and two men were murdered here in 12 hours - The Travis County DA is accused of hiding evidence in a use-of-force case that's been set for trial seven times and never gone Let's get int

In this week's issue: - ERCOT's grid has 357,000 MW of data center requests queued against ~85,500 MW of peak demand — and Texas legislators are now grilling the people responsible - Autonomous cabless freight trucks, no steering wheel, no driver cab — rolling down SH 130 between Austin and San Antonio with federal approval - Tesla's unsupervised robotaxi geofence just crossed the Colorado River into downtown Austin for the first time — 245 square miles and expanding - Austin homeowners can now

In this week's issue: - OpenAI just bought a two-person tech talk show for a rumored $100M+ — and the person it reports to is not an editor - Why small Texas towns banking on data center taxes are making a bet that might blow up in their faces - California grew its bureaucracy 60x faster than its population over the last decade — Joe Lonsdale has the numbers - Jelly Roll, Willie Nelson, and psychedelic rock: Austin's spring and summer event calendar is stacked Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: - Stargate just got a street address in Austin — a SoftBank-linked entity quietly bought the old 3M campus, and the "Cosmos" codename in state filings tells you everything you need to know - An Austin company closed a $90M round where its own customers wrote the checks — and turned 0% AI-assisted code to 50%+ in one year at a global PE firm - Texas is about to dethrone Northern Virginia as the world's largest data center market, and Austin's vacancy rate is basically zero

In this week's issue: - Austin's largest funding round in history — $1.75B for autonomous warships, and the Palantir co-founder at the center of it - Downtown Austin's brawl video went nationally viral, and the city's $31M homelessness plan has zero targets for getting anyone off the street - Jason Calacanis: move your 50-250 person company here, give your team a 35% raise — and the math actually checks out - Justice Clarence Thomas coming to UT, 1,200 drones at COTA, and the most important SXS

In this week's issue: - Travis County blocked a developer who offered to pay $30M to clean up a landfill — without reading a single engineering document and without legal authority — while hiding a $200M taxpayer liability through 30+ executive sessions since the 1980s - John Deere is quietly running one of the most consequential autonomous vehicle operations in the entire Austin metro on 360 acres east of the city — and almost nobody is talking about it - Tesla shipped robotaxi-grade code to e

In this week's issue: - SpaceX is filing its S-1 this week for a $75B raise at $1.75T — the largest IPO in history, and the Austin angle is bigger than anyone has written about yet - Fort Worth is ranked #1 in the nation for permitting speed; Austin is ranked 219th — same state, same laws, completely different governments - Downtown Austin's dumpster contract doubled to $4M/year, with two bids that came in $2,000 apart on a $20 million deal — no council member asked a single question - Tesla's

In this week's issue: - All 11 of xAI's original co-founders are gone — Musk admitted the company "was not built right" and is rebuilding it as a hardware empire with Austin at its center - Taylor City Council unanimously approved a $2.5B data center next to Samsung's chip fab, where the first 2nm silicon in U.S. history is already being produced - A Waymo robotaxi froze and blocked an ambulance during the March 1 mass shooting — and the remote operators in the Philippines couldn't do a thing a

In this week's issue: - $7.5 billion in AI infrastructure landed in Texas this week — Google, Anthropic, and a $2.5B Taylor data center prove the compute race is over - Austin startups raised a record $7.19B in venture capital last year, beating the 2021 peak - City hall voted to spend $1.8M on art for a maintenance garage while pushing max tax increases and botching payroll for 675 employees - Jon Dee Graham — the only musician inducted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame three times — dead at

In today's issue: - Two Austin developers getting sabotaged by bureaucracy — one by the Parks Department, one threatening to yank land out of city limits entirely - CBS Evening News heading for worst Q1 of the 21st century under Bari Weiss - Austin's startup ecosystem grew 13.9x to $2T — nearly double the Bay Area's pace - Waymo operating fully driverless commercial rides in Austin via Uber, while Tesla has 94 vehicles with only 8 unsupervised Let's ride.

In today's issue: - Elon Musk just announced the most ambitious semiconductor project in history — but what's actually under construction versus what's 20 years out - Austin is now the only city in America with three competing robotaxi operators running simultaneously - TPPF sues Austin over a $126M annual "fee" the city's been collecting for 30 years while sitting on a $2B road backlog - A cookie company that will legally marry you alongside your order Let's get into it.

In this week's issue: - Terafab's power requirements are the actual bottleneck—and they're cracked, not catastrophic. - Prediction markets face bipartisan siege, but the real story is Don Jr.'s naked conflicts of interest. - TOMO Mags: Austin analog collectors reject the algorithm; print shops are building community infrastructure. - AI automation is bifurcating labor: experienced workers rise, entry-level workers disappear. Let's go.

In this week's issue: - **Terafab is real, but can Musk actually execute it?** We're rebalancing the hype with hard questions about manufacturing track record, equipment bottlenecks, and realistic timelines. - **The infrastructure constraint nobody's talking about.** Austin's grid is already at capacity. Terafab needs 10+ gigawatts. This is how ambition meets reality. - **Creator economy signal.** Independent Austin builders are doubling down on analog culture—what TOMO Mags' brick-and-mortar e

In today's issue: - Elon Musk unveils TERAFAB — a $20-25B chip plant targeting 1 terawatt of AI compute annually, the biggest semiconductor project in U.S. history, and 80% of the output is going to orbit - A blockbuster Science paper argues intelligence won't be a singular god-AI but plural, social, and deeply entangled with billions of humans and trillions of agents - Barton Springs Road fire behind an abandoned restaurant, a brutal bus stabbing on South Lamar, and city officials urging "kind