In this week's issue:

  • The kid who built chips in his parents' garage is now moving a 120,000 sq ft semiconductor company — co-founded with the most important chip architect of the last 30 years — to Austin
  • Waymo blocked an ambulance during a mass shooting, then declined to show up to a public safety meeting about it
  • A congressional candidate's video of a Sunday night East Austin shooting went viral with 268,000 views — and the city's soft-on-crime leadership is getting the blame
  • Austin has $90M worth of bridges falling apart and a city government budgeting $4M a year to fix them

Texas is moving. Let's go.

Top Stories

Atomic Semi Is Moving to Austin — And It's Bringing Jim Keller With It

Sam Zeloof announced Sunday that Atomic Semi is shifting its primary hiring focus from San Francisco to Austin, Texas — establishing a 120,000 sq ft headquarters for R&D and semiconductor production. The announcement went viral instantly. Michael Dell dropped a 🤠 welcome. Beff Jezos — Guillaume Verdon, the physicist and public face of the e/acc movement — replied: "I think I will join you in Texas." Zeloof's own framing was dead simple: "After 4 years in California, the Next Phase is in Texas. Texas is about speed, capability, scale, and fun." This is not a satellite office or a tax optimization play. This is a full operational pivot, with competitive pay above market and equity, targeting engineers who want to build things fast.

If you don't know who these two people are, you should. Jim Keller is co-founder of Atomic Semi and one of the most consequential chip architects alive — the lead architect behind AMD's K7, K8, and Zen microarchitectures, Apple's A4 and A5 chips, Tesla's Full Self-Driving hardware, and stints at Intel and Tenstorrent. His name on a company is a credibility signal that reverberates through the entire industry. Sam Zeloof is the CEO — and he is the other kind of American original. As a teenager in New Jersey, he fabricated working integrated circuits with over 1,200 transistors at 300nm features in his parents' garage using salvaged equipment and electron beam lithography, documenting the whole thing on YouTube. He's now running a semiconductor company. That is not a metaphor for anything; it is just the actual story. The technology they're building — electron beam direct-write lithography that bypasses expensive photomasks by writing circuit patterns directly onto silicon — targets mature nodes (22-90nm) and promises functional silicon in days instead of the months traditional foundry pipelines require. They're also building Atomic Studio, a browser-based EDA platform that integrates layout, schematic, and simulation with direct hardware control.

The context makes this land even harder. Atomic Semi's Austin move arrives after Samsung's Taylor fab is targeting first chips off the line this year from its 1,200-acre factory northeast of Austin, and after Q.ANT (photonic computing) planted its U.S. headquarters in Austin. xAI's Terafab semiconductor complex is in development. The hardware internet is literally being built in Central Texas, and now the garage chip kid and the greatest chip architect of his generation are setting up shop in the middle of it. When Beff Jezos says he's coming to Texas and Michael Dell sends a cowboy emoji, that's not hype — that's Austin's gravitational pull on the people building the next version of everything.

Sources: Sam Zeloof on X, Beff Jezos on X, Michael Dell on X

Upcoming Events

Waymo Blocked an Ambulance During a Mass Shooting. Then It Skipped Austin's Safety Meeting.

On March 1, 2026, a Waymo autonomous vehicle stopped in the road and would not move while EMS was responding to the West Sixth Street mass shooting at Buford's Backyard — the attack that killed four people. An officer intervened to get the vehicle out of the way. Nearly two months later, Austin City Council scheduled a joint Public Safety and Mobility Committee meeting for April 29 specifically to address how autonomous vehicles interact with emergency scenes. Waymo's response: decline to attend. The company's stated justification is that it already conducted a "confidential briefing" and "answered all questions." Council Member Zohaib Qadri was direct: "At this time, we do not have a verbal or written commitment from Waymo" on geofencing or any other operational change. He added, with diplomatic restraint: "I hope they choose to be at the table... If they don't, that decision will speak for itself about how they view their responsibility to the people of Austin." Tesla and Zoox also received invitations and had not committed to attending.

The accountability gap here is structural, not incidental. Texas Senate Bill 2017 (2017) preempted cities from regulating autonomous vehicles — meaning Austin literally cannot mandate geofencing, restrict AV operating zones, or compel operational changes without state action. Qadri's proposed 1,000-foot geofencing mandate around active emergency scenes would require TxDMV or the Texas Legislature to act. The city holds the public frustration and none of the regulatory authority. Waymo knows this. Their "we answered all questions in private" posture is not a PR misstep — it is the rational behavior of a company that has no legal obligation to appear before a city council that cannot actually regulate it. Waymo operates across more than 140 square miles of Austin with over 250 vehicles. The April 29 meeting is, structurally, a performative accountability hearing without enforcement power.

The one near-term lever is at the state level. Texas SB 2807 (2025) created a mandatory TxDMV authorization system — all commercial AV operators must hold active permits by May 28, 2026 to continue operating legally. That is the only enforcement mechanism with actual teeth, and it belongs to Austin in no way whatsoever. To be clear about editorial stance here: this newsletter has covered Tesla's Austin robotaxi expansion with genuine enthusiasm, and we remain pro-AV on the merits. But when a company's vehicle impedes emergency response during a shooting that killed four people and that company then refuses to show up for a public safety meeting about it, calling it "answered" because of a private briefing — that is not accountability. That is deflection dressed up as process. The institutions are not keeping pace with the deployment, and Waymo is actively exploiting the gap.

Sources: Austin American-Statesman, KVUE

Weird Austin

One Thing

Today's issue tells a single story in two halves: the world's best chip designers are choosing Austin, and Austin has to figure out how to govern the robots already on its streets. Both stories are moving faster than any institution can keep up with. That gap is exactly where this newsletter lives.

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