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AITX Weekly: Expansion, Superintelligence, and the Pollution Tradeoff
From big builds in the Permian to Meta’s AGI push and a heated clean energy debate—here’s what’s shaping AI in Texas this week.
AITX Team & Michael Daigler
June 13, 2025
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.
Before we jump into the regular news, a few housekeeping items:
Upcoming AITX Events:
Austin Monthly Meetup: Tuesday, June 24 | sign up here!
Houston Monthly Meetup: Tuesday, June 17 | sign up here!
Hack AI: Thursday, June 5 | sign up here!
Organized AI // Vibe Coders Hackathon, June 21 | 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.
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In this week’s edition you’re getting:
5 Upcoming Events
3 AI Community Stories
1 Community Highlight
So let’s jump in!
UPCOMING EVENTS
When: Friday, June 13 | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM CST (Today)
What: Come join the local ATX Build Session for the World's Largest Hackathon organized by Bolt.new with 80,000+ participants and OVER $1m IN PRIZES!
When: Saturday, June 21 | 6:30 PM - Jun 22, 6:30 PM CST
What: Transform your development skills with cutting-edge AI tools in this intensive 48-hour hackathon focused on building your first AI Agent using AI-assisted development workflows. Designed for mixed skill levels with a beginner-friendly approach, this event balances structured learning with hands-on development time.
When: Monday, June 23 | 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CST
What: AI Product Dinners are a curated event series from AITX and webAI bringing together top technical founders and operators in Austin for intimate discussions on building and scaling real-world AI products.
When: Wednesday, July 2 | 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.” We experiment together with LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, and the broader AI stack—sharing demos, pitfalls, and wins so everyone levels up.
🦫 AI & Go
When: Tuesday, June 24 | 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM CST
Where: Radio Coffee 4208 Manchaca Rd · Austin, TX
What: Join Women Who Go Austin for an insightful event on exploring AI & Go. This event will provide valuable knowledge and informal discussion on how Go can become a player in the AI space. Connect with like-minded women in tech, network with industry professionals, and dive deep into the world of open source software development.
COMMUNITY STORIES
New Era Helium and Sharon AI are looking to scale their joint venture, Texas Critical Data Centers (TCDC), into one of the largest AI infrastructure hubs in the Permian Basin.
Why it matters: The Permian’s energy abundance is powering a wave of AI infrastructure—and this move signals Texas’s growing role as a nation-leading AI compute zone.
Need-to-know:
TCDC is in advanced talks with enterprise clients to anchor large-scale AI compute deployments
Actively acquiring more land in Ector County to expand data center capacity
New board members with expertise in energy, infrastructure, and digital innovation are being vetted to support growth
Learn more here.
Meta is forming a new superintelligence group led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, recruiting 50 top engineers to build artificial general intelligence—and push beyond it.
Why it matters: With competitors racing to develop AGI, Meta’s Texas-based efforts hint at broader ambitions to lead not just in AI, but in post-human-level intelligence.
Need-to-know:
The team’s focus: AGI and superintelligence—AI that can outperform humans across all intellectual tasks
Meta plans to use this tech across military, social, and Metaverse applications
The move underscores Meta’s urgency to catch up and leapfrog AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic
Learn more here.
A new report from the Environmental Integrity Project warns that Texas’s AI-driven gas power boom could generate pollution equal to 27 million cars—with over 100 gas plants planned or proposed.
Why it matters: Texas is sprinting to meet AI infrastructure demand, but critics say it’s doing so at the cost of public health and clean energy progress.
Need-to-know:
Over 30 gas-fired power plants already permitted, mostly near urban and oilfield areas
Some plants were allegedly misclassified to avoid stricter emissions controls
Emissions include cancer-linked chemicals and fine particulates that impact lungs and asthma
Learn more here.
COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHT
This week, we’re spotlighting Preju Kanuparthy.
Here is his message to the community:
Hi my name is Preju and I am the co-founder of Headline. I moved to Austin at the end of January and have been loving it so far. Headline is a local news app that was born in Washington state. The special sauce of our app is that we allow people to get personalized newsletter for any city or topics they want.
We built some interesting backend infrastructure that allows us to capture tons of data and we are currently looking at ways we can spin it out that extends beyond our local news app.
Ask: I moved here recently, would love to meet some people who are working in defense or doing cool things with data!
Email: [email protected]
That’s all for now, folks!
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