Hello everyone! AITX Team here with more updates this week.
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NVIDIA DGX Spark Hackathon Recap
AITX Community is partnering with NVIDIA, Arm, and ASUS this December with another hackathon centered around their new DGX Spark hardware.
DGX Spark Frontier Hackathon | Dec 2025
Last weekend, the Austin AI ecosystem proved its grit. Over 100 hackers descended on the DGX Spark Frontier Hackathon, turning raw compute into real-world solutions.
A massive thank you to our partners NVIDIA, Arm, and ASUS, and our supporting sponsors webAI, Glīd, SymbyAI, and AutoHDR for providing the hardware and challenges that fueled the weekend.
And the Winners Are...
🥇 Grand Prize + Factory Safety Winners: Team "Tabasco"
The Build: PolicyAngel — An AI safety compliance system using local Vision-Language Models (VLM) and smart glasses to detect factory safety violations in real-time and provide instant audio feedback.
🥈 2nd Place + AutoHDR Winners: Team "Pixel Sorcery"
The Build: A privacy-first real estate photo editing pipeline that runs locally on the edge, enhancing raw images into professional-grade assets in seconds.
🥉 3rd Place + Urban Infrastructure Winners: Team "UnderVolt"
The Build: A GPU-accelerated workflow analyzing 2.2 million construction permits to generate near real-time urban growth insights for city planners.
🎖️ Community Choice Winners: Team "The Destroyers"
The Build: An ultra-fast automated photo editing tool using a Triton Ensemble pipeline to cut processing costs to $0.17 per 1k images.
🚚 Glīd Challenge Winners: Team "Inference Mafia"
The Build: A "sovereign command center" optimizing supply chain logistics and routing to bypass port bottlenecks.
🚦 Traffic Optimization Winners: Team "ETA"
The Build: An intelligent dashboard aiding decision-making for first responders and traffic planners.
🧬 Symby Challenge Winners: Team "Attention Is All You Need"
Who: Omkar Rege, Adam Towner
The Build: A Research Prompt model designed to evaluate AI's role in scientific progress.
Level Up Your Skills:
Want to build like these teams?
Join the NVIDIA Developer Program.
It’s free, and you get access to a self-paced course (worth $90) on the house.
In this week’s edition you’re getting:
5 Upcoming Events
3 AI Community Stories
So let’s jump in!
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Thursday, January 29 | 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM CST
Where: Antler VC Austin, Texas
What: This is the first installment of a workshop series for people who want to make money by practically applying AI to real-world business problems in valuable industries.
When: Monday, January 19 | 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM CST
What: 58% of Texas students are not at grade level in math.
That's not a typo. According to the latest STAAR data, more than half of Texas kids are behind - and most parents have no idea.
Why? Because "passing" a class doesn't mean "on grade level." Schools don't always tell you the difference.
Assessment Day answers one question: Is your child actually on track?
When: Wed, January 7, 2026 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST
What: We focus on agentic software development: multi-agent architectures, middleware patterns, LangChain + LangGraph workflows, DeepAgents, and real-world application building. Many presenters are power users of Claude Code, and we frequently explore how developers use it in their agent workflows.
When: Saturday, January 24 | 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM CST
What: Launched in 2011, and quite possibly the longest running big data conference in the world, Data Day Texas returns in January with an international list of marquee presenters.
💻 Hack AI
When: Thursday January 8 | 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CST
What: A monthly session for builders all over the Austin area to learn about and build the latest AI technology.
COMMUNITY STORIES
TeraWulf finalized project financing for a 168 MW high performance computing joint venture at its Abernathy, Texas campus. The build is designed for liquid cooled AI workloads and could scale to 240 MW of gross power capacity, with commissioning targeted for the second half of 2026.
Why it matters: More financed capacity means more near term places to run big training and inference workloads in Texas, plus more pressure on power, permitting, and grid strategy.
Need-to-know:
168 MW financed now, with a path to 240 MW gross capacity
Long term hosting structure with credit support routed through Fluidstack and a global hyperscale partner
Commissioning planned for the second half of 2026, with room to expand using existing land and transmission
Learn more here.
Records obtained by The Texas Tribune show Texas A&M System staff using AI tools to scan syllabi and course descriptions for terms tied to new restrictions on teaching about race and gender. At Texas State, administrators encouraged faculty to use an AI writing assistant to rewrite course titles and descriptions to sound more “neutral.”
Why it matters: This is a real-world test of AI in governance: messy inputs, political pressure, and high stakes decisions where “looks right” is not the same as “is right.”
Need-to-know:
Texas A&M System says it is using OpenAI services through an existing subscription to support a systemwide course audit, with humans making final decisions
Early testing showed inconsistent results depending on how queries were phrased, raising accuracy and repeatability concerns
Texas State administrators pushed fast rewrites for hundreds of courses, including prompts designed to remove language seen as advocacy
Learn more here.
Fermi’s Project Matador, an 11 gigawatt data center and power campus in the Texas Panhandle, lost a planned $150 million advance tied to its first prospective tenant after an exclusivity period ended. Some reporting links the tenant to Amazon, but Reuters says Fermi disputes that claim.
Why it matters: Texas is building massive AI capacity fast, and this is what risk looks like in real time: financing and timelines can hinge on one anchor tenant and a negotiation detail.
Need-to-know:
The $150M was an “advance in aid of construction” style payment, and none of it was drawn before it was terminated
Project Matador depends on a 99-year ground lease with the Texas Tech University System, tied to getting tenant commitments in place
Fermi says it is talking with other potential tenants and still expects 2026 power delivery, but the market is clearly watching tenant certainty
Learn more here.
That’s all for now, folks!
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