Hello everyone! AITX Team here with more updates this week.
If you’re new here, welcome! 👋 At AITX, we aim to:
Connect you with like-minded peers passionate about AI.
Provide a space for sharing ideas and receiving feedback on AI projects you’re building.
Share helpful tools and invaluable resources.
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Before we jump into the regular news, a few housekeeping items:
Upcoming AITX Community Events:
Houston AITX Monthly Meetup: Tuesday, December 2, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM CST | sign up here! (we had to bump it back a bit this time)
To stay in the loop on all our monthly meetups and other community organized events, subscribe to our AITX Community calendar here.
Check out our Community Directory:
Where you can fill out your profile and find other members of the AITX community. If you haven’t filled out your profile yet, please follow the link HERE and submit your information.
NVIDIA DGX Spark Hackathon
AITX Community is partnering with NVIDIA, Arm, and ASUS this December with another hackathon centered around their new DGX Spark hardware.
When: 5:00 PM CST, December 12 - 4:00 PM CST, December 14
What: This Hackathon brings together the strongest frontier builders and engineers in Texas to push the boundary of what’s possible on next-generation NVIDIA compute.
25 teams will work hands-on with the ASUS Ascent GX10 to complete targeted Build Challenges provided by NVIDIA and local partner companies.
There will be prize packages for each Challenge winner as well as the overall Best Build.
This is a team-based hackathon. Full-team applications will be prioritized over individual applications.
Minimum team size is 2 and maximum team size is 5.
If you apply as an individual, we'll try our best to match you into a team, and you'll be required to compete with the team we match you with if accepted.
In this week’s edition you’re getting:
🤠 Meetup Recap
5 Upcoming Events
3 AI Community Stories
1 Community Highlight
So let’s jump in!
Austin Meetup Recap
We Had 3 Great Demos This Week
Rizome Labs provides a modular platform for remote development environments built around “worktrees” and on-demand sandboxes. Teams get persistent dev state in the cloud with zero local setup, fast context-switching between branches/environments, and scalable orchestration for many developers working across the same codebase.
Adrenaline Interactive enables native, in-game product placement through its Brand Fusion AI™ engine, which ingests brand assets and automatically generates in-game objects, skins, billboards, and UI that feel natural to each title. They help advertisers reach and convert gamers (especially Gen Z) directly inside gameplay, with analytics on impressions, interactions, and campaign performance.
Gradient is building “open intelligence” via open foundation models and a distributed compute stack for training and serving AI. Their Parallax framework turns heterogeneous, geographically distributed GPUs into a unified inference platform, while products like Gradient Cloud give developers API access to state-of-the-art open models at competitive prices, backed by ongoing research in distributed ML and agents.
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Thursday, December 11 | 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: Register to see address
What: An end-of-year holiday celebration for the Austin AI community—engineers, founders, researchers, and operators. This year, we're partnering with SAFE Austin to help provide gifts for families in need this Holiday season. Tickets to the event are free, but we encourage you to donate to SAFE during registration or bring a small gift donation when you attend. 100% of revenue will be donated to SAFE Austin under their Holidays program.
When: Thursday, December 4th | 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CST
Where: 801 Travis St, Downtown Houston
What: Will feature 3 presentations on practical AI applications as well as networking opportunities with fellow AI enthusiasts.
When: Wednesday, December 3 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: ACC - RGC 3000 1218 West Avenue · Austin, TX
What: Join us for an evening of hands-on demos, short deep-dives, and community networking. We’re calling this a Mixer & Showcase — learn practical patterns for LangGraph and agent stacks, share war stories, and meet local builders.
When: Friday, December 5 | 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM CST
Where: Location TBD
What: Join us for the first-ever Physical AI Builders Meetup in Dallas, happening Dec 5th at UT Dallas. Fresh off the success of the F50 Physical AI Summits in Austin and Silicon Valley, this meetup brings the future of intelligent machines, robotics, and AI-driven manufacturing directly to Dallas–Fort Worth — one of America’s strongest industrial and technology powerhouses.
When: Sunday, December 14 | 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM CST
What: This free pilot event is a 4-hour AI-powered math and reading intensive for kids ages 8–14, held at Dave & Buster’s Domain Northside on Sunday, December 14. Students work on a personalized learning platform that adapts to their level and earn arcade time based on the effort and progress they make. Parents receive a detailed progress report, optional info session, and are asked to give honest feedback to help shape a future paid version of the program.
COMMUNITY STORIES
A bipartisan group of 16 Texas state senators, led by Sen. Angela Paxton, is urging Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn to oppose any federal moratorium that would block states from regulating AI. Their letter argues Texas needs freedom to enforce its own guardrails, including the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act (TRAIGA).
Why it matters: If Congress freezes state-level AI regulation, it could undercut Texas-made rules that shape how startups, enterprises, and government agencies build and deploy AI here.
Need-to-know:
The senators want Cruz and Cornyn to resist any federal preemption of state AI laws for the foreseeable future.
TRAIGA aims to ban AI uses like social credit systems, self-harm encouragement, criminal activity, and tighten protections around child safety, data privacy, and discrimination.
The letter frames AI as approaching artificial general intelligence and argues that states, not just Washington, should lead on balancing innovation with protections for Texans.
Learn more here.
Texas Critical Data Centers, a joint venture between New Era Energy Digital and Sharon AI, just expanded its planned AI and high-performance computing campus in Ector County to 438 acres near Odessa. The site is being designed as a multi-phase, multi-gigawatt campus that can scale well beyond 1 gigawatt of capacity.
Why it matters: This is another signal that the Permian Basin is positioning itself as core infrastructure for AI workloads, not just oil and gas.
Need-to-know:
New Era acquired an additional 203 contiguous acres, nearly doubling the original campus footprint.
Phase 1 construction is targeted for 2026, with engineering, master planning, and power-interconnection studies already underway.
The company is also planning a separate 3,500-acre multi-gigawatt AI hub in Lea County, New Mexico, tying West Texas energy resources directly to next-generation GPU compute.
Learn more here.
Houston probate attorney and longtime “State Your Case” columnist Ronald Lipman writes about why his legal advice column still matters when readers can just ask Grok, Perplexity, or ChatGPT. He openly uses AI tools to brainstorm and proof answers, but argues that Texas-specific law, local judges, and messy family dynamics still need a human in the loop.
Why it matters: This is a clear picture of how Texas professionals are already pairing AI with deep local expertise, not replacing themselves outright.
Need-to-know:
Lipman tested Grok, Perplexity, and ChatGPT on whether his column is still needed and found Grok’s answer sharp and witty, while others felt generic.
He uses AI behind the scenes to pressure-test his responses, but says the tools still miss nuance and occasionally get things wrong.
He expects AI advice columns will eventually replace many Q&A formats, yet argues that, for now, Texans with real legal problems still need a human attorney who understands local law and context.
Learn more here.
Community Highlight
This week, we’re highlighting Yorph AI.
Think of it as a data engineer in your pocket for business users (pms, analysts, operations).
The agentic platform helps users sync, transform, analyze data through data workflows by simply asking.
It also helps users validate their logic through dry runs and clarifying questions, ensuring correctness before running on the entire dataset. And the platform includes built-in semantic awareness that continuously evolves as users interact with the agent.
You can check it out here.
That’s all for now, folks!
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