Austin Tech — The New Silicon Valley

The downtown Seaholm Power Plant — where Elon Musk unveiled the $20 billion-plus Terafab chipmaking project last month — is becoming the physical home of the joint venture behind it. xAI has taken over Athenahealth’s entire 112,298-square-foot footprint at Seaholm through a March sublease, and CBRE’s Q1 report suggests the actual lease is held by the full Tesla · SpaceX · xAI · Intel consortium. Construction finish-out was already underway at the site on April 15, with no-photography signs posted around the perimeter.

Both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage were successfully caught by the launch tower "chopsticks" for the first time. SpaceX's Austin engineering team led the guidance system development. Full reusability drops launch costs to under $10M per flight.

Starlink's satellite-to-phone service went live across all 50 states. Emergency 911 works on any phone, anywhere — no cell tower needed. The service is managed from Starlink's Bastrop County operations center, 30 minutes from Austin.

X.com (formerly Twitter) rolled out its payment platform to Austin users first. Peer-to-peer payments, merchant transactions, and creator tipping now available. The "everything app" vision takes its biggest step forward from X's downtown Austin headquarters.

Synthesia, the London-based startup whose platform turns text into AI-generated training videos, will open an 8,000-square-foot office at 119 Nueces Street downtown — its third global outpost after London HQ and New York. The Austin team starts at 12 and is expected to triple by year-end. The move lands alongside simultaneous openings in Paris and Berlin, all bankrolled by the company’s $200 million Series E closed in January. Opportunity Austin president & CEO Susan Davenport framed it as another international win for the region’s tech-relocation pipeline, which is about to get a boost from a planned Texas trade office in London.

On a 7,500-square-foot slab off Highway 71 in Cedar Creek, a four-person family machine shop named Aqua Jet, Inc. is quietly cutting to tolerances tighter than most of Austin’s bigger names will admit they need. Founded and still run by president Raleigh Tirion — with son Nicholas Tirion on the engineering side — the shop turns around high-pressure abrasive waterjet and CNC routing jobs in as little as 48 hours, at precision levels compliant with MIL-S-45208. Estimated revenue: around $6 million. Location-wise, it sits 30 minutes east of Tesla’s Gigafactory and 20 minutes from Starlink’s Bastrop County ops center.

The Boring Company submitted a proposal to Austin City Council for a 15-mile underground transit loop connecting the airport to downtown, UT campus, and the Domain. Tesla vehicles would shuttle passengers at 100+ mph through 12-foot tunnels. Estimated cost: $500M — 1/10th of light rail.

Samsung's $17 billion fabrication plant in Taylor, 30 miles from Austin, has begun production of 2nm chips — the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the Western Hemisphere. 2,000 direct jobs and an estimated 10,000 indirect jobs in the Austin metro.

Austin-based Apptronik revealed the second generation of their Apollo humanoid robot, designed for warehouse logistics. The robot can carry 55 lbs and work alongside humans. Mercedes-Benz is the first deployment partner. $350M in funding secured.

Oracle completed the latest phase of its waterfront headquarters campus on Lady Bird Lake. The company relocated from Silicon Valley to Austin in 2020 and now employs over 10,000 in the Austin metro. Larry Ellison has called Austin "the future of tech."

Apple's second-largest campus (after Cupertino) is adding a new building dedicated to artificial intelligence and machine learning research. Austin is already home to Apple's Mac Pro manufacturing and 7,000+ employees.

Meta's new Austin office focuses on augmented and virtual reality hardware development. 500+ engineers working on next-generation Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. Austin was chosen for its talent pool and proximity to Samsung's chip fabs.