Todd Grantham retweeted
I’m glad someone finally put together the Austin Deep Tech 50.
• $98B combined valuation
• $10B raised in the last 12 months
• 11 unicorns, including 3 decacorns
• Defense leads with 26%
• Energy next with 20%
• Bio shows up in our neurotech cluster
Today, we are excited to announce the first annual Austin Deep Tech 50.
Austin has become the hub for some of America's best deep tech founders, so we brought together 8 VC firms with a local presence — @overmatchvc, @valor, @8vc, Banner VC, @BCapitalGroup, @TheAmbitionCap, @ensemblevc, and Trust Ventures — to vote on the 50 startups making the biggest impact.
Together they've raised $10B+ in the last 12 months.
Full write-up: overmatch.substack.com/p/202…
The full list 🧵👇
Todd Grantham retweeted
Austin is becoming one of the most important job engines in the country.
It doesn’t yet have the scale of a NYC, DFW, or Houston, but the combo of growth rate plus absolute jobs added is next level.
Todd Grantham retweeted
Gavin, spot on.
AI is bringing manufacturing back to America and reindustrializing the nation after decades of offshoring.
AI is creating demand that drives investment in our aging power grid and sustainable energy, powered by market forces, not subsidies.
AI is creating construction and manufacturing jobs across energy plants, chip fabs and data centers.
AI is creating new companies and industries. $400 billion has been invested in AI startups in the past six months alone.
Builders must partner with communities to build in their hometowns, earn trust and create local benefits.
We have an opportunity to create lasting benefits for communities across America and help America lead the next industrial revolution.
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
Todd Grantham retweeted
100% Agree @GavinSBaker. Now, I'm going to debunk every single piece of mis-information about data centers that I've ever seen online:
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers use a lot of water.
FACT: Most AI data centers are closed loop dry cooler design that barely consume any water at all. A 20MW 10,000 GPU cluster needs 20,000 gallons to charge and doesn't use material water after that. That's less than 1/4 of the amount of water used to raise the amount of beef the average American consumes in a year. That means one of the largest data centers in the world, at 2GW, consumes less water than 20 people's annual beef consumption or three American's total water footprint (@ ~600k gallons per year for the average American).
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers increase electricity prices.
FACT: Data centers bring down a community's average electricity bill because they spur development of new power generation. Most data centers bring their own power generation, pay fees to the utility to build more power plants, or bring their own power storage to actually reduce the cost of energy in their community. Northern Virginia has some of the most data centers per capita and has low power costs. See research from the Electric Power Research Institute marketplace.org/story/2026/0… and arxiv.org/pdf/2606.19777.
>DISINFORMATION: Data centers don't create jobs
FACT: Data centers create hundreds of jobs at construction and a high number of exceptionally high paying jobs (many over $120k/year) for their ongoing operation and maintenance. No, they're not similar to an automotive plant in terms of the jobs / MW but they are phenomenal additions to an industrial park and community.
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers are constantly super noisy
FACT: Data centers are one of the quietest industrial buildings in the world. Drive by a data center in your city and roll down your window. They are very quiet. In fact, a metal mill is FAR louder than a data center---up to 10,000,000 more sound energy is produced by a mill and perceptually a mill can be 128x louder than a data center.
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers emit noise pollution from diesel engines running all the time.
FACT: Emergency generator sets are almost never turned on unless the grid connection goes out. This would be less than 0.5% of the time!
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers are surveillance systems
FACT: Data centers actually just host computers owned by private companies that are used to make phone calls, access the internet, run ChatGPT, Claude, X, Instagram, Facebook, Google, play multiplayer video games, and every thing you ever do online. That's it.
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers make water dirty
FACT: AOC held up a bottle of dirty water and said this is what data centers do. Completely false, well water disruption is a rare side effect of EVERY construction site in the history of humanity. This is not at all unique to data centers and is a complete red herring.
> DISINFORMATION: Data centers get massive tax breaks and drain tax dollars from towns
FACT: Data centers pay massive amounts of tax and often times huge % of an annual budget of a county or town! It's an absolute bonanza for the towns that are lucky enough to welcome a data center. New schools, new roads, new services are all paid for. Even if there is a sales tax rebate we're still talking tens of millions of new tax revenue. In 2022, Virginia’s data centers collectively generated $1 billion in local tax revenue and $640 million in state tax revenue! That was 2022. netchoice.org/wp-content/upl…
Feel free to reply here if you have any other question you'd like answered about data centers happy to provide actual facts.
Todd Grantham retweeted
This week in “data centers raise your bill:”
- Georgia Power: Residential savings go from $102/yr to $180/yr by 2029
- PG&E: 4th rate cut in 2 years, down 11% since 2024
- Indiana Michigan asks regulators for a rate reduction
All cite data center growth as the reason.
Todd Grantham retweeted
Indiana & Michigan Power (I&M) has asked Indiana's state gov if they can lower rates because they're making so much money from data centers and they want to pass savings on
If the state approves, customers will see $100 cut from annual bills, which they'll freeze for three years
This side of the story is not told nearly enough. There is too much doom and gloom without solutions. But there are real innovations and investments happening that are truly making a positive difference in consumers' lives...data centers can be good neighbors.
This this this this!!! Never forget America--you have it really great. And we should all just step back and pause, then step in and hug it out! Welcome to America!
This is exceptional. Let the market decide!!!
Under capitalism, socialists are free to build socialism.
Under socialism, capitalists aren’t free to build anything.
Nothing stops a group of socialists pooling their money, forming a company, and splitting every wage and every pound of profit perfectly equally.... Or to donate all profit to the government.
It’s legal. It’s easy. Owning the means of production is as simple as setting up a company.
Marx wrote his manifesto before the invention of limited liability companies. Back then “seize the factory” meant seizing it from the handful of families who could afford one.
That argument expired the day anyone could start a company with limited liability, raise investment and hire who they want.
Socialists are free to lead by example and demonstrate their system works. They can out-recruit, out-motivate, out-build and out innovate based on their ideas if they like. It would prove the philosophy works. Capitalism will happily host their experiment.
The fact that nobody does this tells you a lot.
This.
AOC vient d'expliquer qu'on ne peut pas "gagner" un milliard de dollars. Que c'est mathématiquement impossible. Que tout milliardaire est forcément un voleur, un abuseur de lois du travail, un payeur sous-évalué.
Ce niveau d'ignorance économique de la part d'une élue qui légifère sur l'économie devrait nous faire hurler.
Reprenons depuis le début, parce qu'apparemment c'est nécessaire.
Un milliardaire n'est pas quelqu'un qui a un milliard de dollars en cash sur son compte. Un milliardaire est quelqu'un dont le marché évalue les actifs (principalement des parts d'entreprise) à un milliard ou plus.
Elon Musk n'a pas "pris" 800 milliards à quelqu'un. Il a créé Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Le marché évalue ces entreprises à plusieurs trillions cumulés. Il en détient une fraction. C'est ça, sa "fortune".
La question fondamentale qu'AOC ne se pose jamais : d'où vient la valeur ?
La valeur n'est pas un gâteau fixe qu'on se partage. La valeur est créée. Quand SpaceX divise par 10 le coût du lancement orbital, ce n'est pas du vol, c'est de la création pure. Avant Musk, lancer un kilo en orbite coûtait 50K$. Aujourd'hui 1.5K$.
Cette création de valeur est mesurable, vérifiable, et bénéficie à toute l'humanité. L'internet par satellite couvre des zones que les États ont été incapables de connecter en 50 ans. Les voitures électriques ont forcé toute l'industrie auto à se réinventer.
Maintenant, la question centrale qu'AOC évite soigneusement : qui devrait allouer les ressources dans une société ?
Parce que l'argent, fondamentalement, c'est ça. Un signal d'allocation. Décider où va le capital, le travail, l'énergie, le temps humain.
Trois options historiques :
L'État (bureaucrates élus ou nommés)
Les comités citoyens (démocratie directe)
Les entrepreneurs qui ont prouvé leur capacité d'allocation par leurs résultats
L'option 1 a été testée massivement au 20ème siècle. URSS, Chine maoïste, Venezuela, Cuba, Corée du Nord. Résultat : famines, pénuries, effondrement. Des dizaines de millions de morts. L'allocation étatique est un désastre empirique total.
L'option 2 n'a jamais existé à grande échelle pour des raisons mathématiques. Le calcul économique nécessaire pour allouer les ressources d'une économie moderne dépasse les capacités cognitives d'une assemblée. Hayek l'avait démontré dès 1945 (The Use of Knowledge in Society).
L'option 3, c'est le marché. Et le marché récompense ceux qui allouent bien. Ceux qui allouent mal font faillite, perdent leur capital, sortent du jeu. Les survivants sont par sélection darwinienne les meilleurs allocateurs disponibles.
Elon Musk est riche parce qu'il a prouvé, sur 25 ans, qu'il alloue mieux le capital que 99.9999% de l'humanité. PayPal. Tesla. SpaceX. Starlink. Chaque fois, il a pris du capital et l'a transformé en infrastructure civilisationnelle.
La vraie question n'est pas "pourquoi Musk a tant", c'est : "pourquoi n'a-t-il pas plus ?"
Sérieusement. Si on veut maximiser la création de valeur pour l'humanité, on devrait vouloir que les meilleurs allocateurs aient accès à plus de capital, pas moins.
Donner 100 milliards à AOC pour qu'elle les redistribue selon sa vision morale, c'est garantir leur destruction. Donner 100 milliards à Musk, c'est probablement obtenir des bases martiennes, de l'énergie quasi-gratuite, et une révolution robotique.
Le préjugé d'AOC, c'est que la richesse est un péché moral. C'est une vision théologique, pas économique. Elle traite le capital comme un stock à confisquer, pas comme un flux à orienter vers les usages les plus productifs.
Et c'est là que sa thèse devient grotesque : "vous payez les gens moins que ce qu'ils valent."
Définition de "ce qu'ils valent" selon AOC : ce qu'AOC pense qu'ils devraient toucher. Définition selon le marché : ce qu'un autre employeur est prêt à leur offrir.
Si Tesla payait ses ingénieurs en dessous de leur valeur, ces ingénieurs partiraient chez Google, Apple, Meta. Ils restent. Donc la rémunération est compétitive. Mécanisme de base que tout étudiant en L1 d'éco comprend.
Le pattern fondamental : AOC, et toute la classe politique qui pense comme elle, n'a jamais alloué une seule ressource productive de sa vie. Jamais embauché en assumant le risque salarial. Jamais investi son capital dans un projet incertain. Jamais créé une entreprise qui survit.
Et pourtant elle veut décider qui peut posséder quoi.
C'est l'équivalent de quelqu'un qui n'a jamais joué aux échecs voulant arbitrer un tournoi de grands maîtres en réécrivant les règles à mi-partie.
Ce qui est triste, c'est que cette vision a un coût massif. Chaque fois qu'on taxe les meilleurs allocateurs, on détourne du capital de ses usages productifs vers des usages politiques (subventions, clientélisme, projets vanity étatiques).
La France en sait quelque chose. 50 ans de redistribution, ISF, exit tax, taxe à 75%. Résultat : zéro géant tech, fuite des cerveaux, dette à 113% du PIB, croissance atone.
AOC veut nous vendre le même poison en plus grand format.
La conclusion est inconfortable mais nécessaire : nous avons besoin de plus de milliardaires, pas moins. Plus d'allocateurs prouvés. Plus de capital concentré entre les mains de ceux qui ont démontré qu'ils savent le faire fructifier pour l'humanité.
Et nous avons besoin de moins d'AOC. Moins de gens qui n'ont rien construit, qui n'ont rien risqué, qui n'ont rien créé, mais qui veulent décider à la place de ceux qui font.
Le mythe ce n'est pas "le mythe d'avoir mérité son milliard". Le mythe c'est qu'une députée de 36 ans qui n'a jamais géré un budget supérieur à son staff parlementaire ait la moindre légitimité à théoriser sur l'allocation du capital mondial.
This is a great visualization...Fly Orion Fly!
artemis-ii-tracker.com/
Todd Grantham retweeted
Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.
The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.
The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.
Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.
Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.
Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.
I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.
People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.
This conversation is always difficult because most people simply don’t understand market dynamics or incentives. In a free society, people act in their own self-interest. If you remove profit and reward dependency, productivity dies and the city with it.
If you think things are expensive now, just wait until they’re “free.”
Remarkable. Continuously blurring the lines between science fiction and reality. No one else drives innovation like this.
The Blindsight device from Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.
Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time.
To set expectations correctly, the vision will be at first be low resolution, like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like Geordi La Forge.
Much appreciated, @US_FDA!
Scary how many drones are roaming the skies without following the rules. Detection and awareness is key to keeping everyone safe. Nice job by the team @skysafe for tracking this one. Too close of a call.
Breaking #news: @SkySafe tracked the #drone in restricted #airspace that caused the delay during the #football game between @OhioStateFB and @UofMaryland. CC. @columbuspolice @faanews @SportsCenter
Todd Grantham retweeted
I had the chance to sit down with @plume CEO @fdiner to discuss cycling, his company, and why I’m supporting this year’s #PlumeStrong Cycling Challenge! 👏🏻👏🏻 .
📺 You can watch it here: youtube.com/watch?v=1RxQ5Xeq… #PSCC22





























