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.
Be sure to follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Before we jump into the regular news, a few housekeeping items:
Upcoming AITX Events:
Houston AITX Monthly Meetup: Thursday, Oct 23 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM CST | sign up here!
Austin AITX Monthly Meetup: Tuesday, Oct 28, 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM CST | sign up here!
To stay in the loop on all our monthly meetups and other community organized events, subscribe to our AITX 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.
State of Texas AI Report Interest
Texas is one of the most proactive states in AI policy and regulation.
We want YOU to join the conversation.
AITX Community is collaborating with UT School of Law for the State of AI Report (STAR) for Texas—a first-of-its-kind look at how Texas engineers, entrepreneurs, and businesses are building with AI.
This report will be shared with state policymakers and business leaders to help shape the future of AI in Texas.
If you want your voice included, register your interest below. We’ll follow up with next steps on how you can contribute feedback or insights.
Episode 8 is Live
This episode features Tyler Wells, whose engineering journey spans some truly iconic companies and projects. Tyler’s career reads like a timeline of real-time communications evolution. He joined Skype not once but twice, playing critical roles in unifying codebases and, most notably, building out the original Facebook video calling feature powered by Skype. Tyler then joined Twilio, helping build their video platform from scratch and opening up new opportunities for developers around the world to build video into their apps.
Austin Tech Week AI Hackathon by NVIDIA & AITX Community
When: Friday, October 24 5:00 PM - Oct 25, 8:00 PM CST
Where: Location provided upon approval
Join AITX Community for a weekend of heads down building and collaboration with some of the top developers in Austin's growing engineering community.
NVIDIA is a global leader in accelerated computing, known for pioneering the development of high-performance GPUs that drive advances in AI, graphics, and data science. We'll be spotlighting NVIDIA’s Nemotron family of open models throughout the weekend. Hackers get quickstarts, office hours, and a dedicated Nemotron Track, with prizes for the best use of Nemotron.
It all culminates in Hack Fair - a science fair-style showcase where participants will demo their submission to the community, including local investors, operators, and potential collaborators, for a chance to win the Community Choice Prize.
👇 Register Here 👇
A message from NVIDIA:
NVIDIA is thrilled to partner with the AITX Developer Community during Austin Tech Week! We're bringing updates about our latest Nemotron models and some awesome prizes for the most creative and novel submissions in the competition. Dive into the challenge by building with our portfolio of models, and you are included in a prize track for best use of Nemotron Nano 2 9B, a powerful small language model with reasoning capabilities built on the hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture.
To give your project a head start, we'll have NVIDIA Launchables and Blueprints ready for you to use so you can focus on building something truly innovative. NVIDIA team members will be there to support the builders. Show off your skills and you could even get your project featured on NVIDIA social media and Developer Showcase. We can’t wait to see what you build!
In this week’s edition you’re getting:
5 Upcoming Events
3 AI Community Stories
So let’s jump in!
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Wednesday, November 5 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: ACC - RGC 3000 1218 West Avenue · Austin, TX
What: The AI Middleware Users Group believes in “Learning in the Open.” Together we explore LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, and the wider AI stack—sharing demos, pitfalls, and wins so everyone levels up.
When: Thursday, October 30 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: HICAM 6201 Quinn Luke Trail · Austin, TX
What: In this talk, we introduce Model Context Protocol in accessible terms and then walk through Robot MCP, an open-source server that applies this standard to robotics. Demonstrated on ROS (the most prevalent robotics middleware) Robot MCP enables new classes of tasks that neither AI models nor traditional deterministic robotics could accomplish independently.
When: Tuesday, October 21 | 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM CST
Where: 600 Congress Ave 15th Floor, 15D · Austin, TX
What: We'll be showing you how to build a state of the art RAG system to rival any commercial or open source solution. The case study will be a "Dataroom" type solution to interrogate financial reports like 10k SEC reports. This can be used for building assistants or advanced knowledge retrieval and augmentation
When: Tuesday, November 4 | 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
Where: Capital Factory, Voltron Room (1st floor) 701 Brazos Street · Austin, TX
What: Austin Deep Learning Journal Club is group for committed machine learning practitioners and researchers alike. The group typically meets every first Tuesday of each month to discuss research publications.
When: Tuesday, October 28 | 8:30 AM - 5:30 PM CST
Where: Domain Palm way and rose rock · Austin, TX
What: The Agents of Impact Summit, hosted by AWS and Meta, provides an in-depth exploration of AI agent implementation in production environments. You'll learn directly from customers who use AI agents in production, participate in technical workshops, and discover architectural approaches that work at scale.
COMMUNITY STORIES
Meta announced plans to build a $1.5 billion data center in El Paso, its third in Texas, to expand infrastructure for AI workloads and support its growing cloud operations.
Why it matters: This marks another major commitment from Big Tech to Texas, reinforcing the state’s role as a national center for AI infrastructure and high-performance computing.
Need-to-know:
The El Paso site will open in 2028 and can scale to 1 gigawatt of power capacity.
About 100 permanent jobs and 1,800 construction roles are expected.
The facility will run on 100% renewable energy and recycle its cooling water.
Learn more here.
Nvidia, Microsoft, BlackRock, and Elon Musk’s xAI are backing a $40 billion acquisition of Aligned Data Centers, one of the largest operators in the U.S., marking a major bet on Texas-based AI infrastructure.
Why it matters: This deal cements Texas as a cornerstone for the world’s AI data operations, attracting global capital and top-tier technology partners.
Need-to-know:
The investor group is acquiring Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management.
The facility network spans nearly 80 sites, part of a $40B move to secure AI computing capacity.
Analysts say AI growth depends more on expanding data centers and power access than on financing.
Learn more here.
A Texas Tribune investigation highlights how small communities like Sweeny face brown, foul-smelling water and steep hurdles to access state revolving funds for fixes. Limited staff, complex paperwork, and tight deadlines often block aid.
Why it matters: As AI data centers expand in Texas, water-stressed towns raise concerns about cooling demand and the need for resilient, equitable water infrastructure.
Need-to-know:
In 2023, 267 towns signaled interest in drinking water funds, 38 were invited to apply, 10 received funding.
Sweeny turned down a 70% forgiveness offer, citing lack of capacity to complete engineering paperwork in 30 days.
Prop 4 would direct $20 billion over 20 years to the Texas Water Fund, but experts say needs exceed available money.
Learn more here.
That’s all for now, folks!
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