The Austin Daily News

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 h...

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 Texa...

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 fac...

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 a...

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, n...

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 c...

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 p...

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...

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 serv...

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,...

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...

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...

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 infrastructur...

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 -...

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...

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...

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 - A...

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...

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 i...

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 psyche...

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 Northe...

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...

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 acre...

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 tha...

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 d...