In this week's issue:
- Texas's $10 billion hemp industry just won a temporary courtroom reprieve — but the Friday enforcement deadline is still ticking, and the state's lawyers tried to kick the cameras out
- Two former Bitcoin mines in West Texas converting to AI data centers with a combined 3.1 gigawatts of planned capacity, and one just delivered its first live data hall to CoreWeave
- A physical altercation outside Sam's BBQ became East Austin's second six-person shooting in a single weekend — one suspect arrested, zero excuses left
- Kelly Slater's celebrity wave pool hit $4.6 million in contractor liens and construction has stopped — McConaughey, Tony Hawk, and Drew Brees each dropped $1.25M to get in
- $51 billion in state property tax relief and Austin homeowners somehow ended up with zero net relief
Let's get into it.
Top Stories
- Second six-person shooting in one weekend: altercation outside Sam's BBQ erupts into gunfire, six injured, one arrested. This is now a pattern — Sunday night in East Austin, a fight outside the iconic BBQ spot went sideways into a shootout; two mass-casualty shooting events in two days in the same part of the city is not a coincidence, it's a failure of governance.
- Austin Surf Club halts construction and owes $4.6 million in liens — the celebrity wave pool dream may be on ice. The 333-acre Kelly Slater wave pool project near ABIA, where Matthew McConaughey, Tony Hawk, and Drew Brees each paid $1.25M for memberships, has gone quiet after contractors filed liens with the Travis County Clerk's Office for work done in late 2025 and early 2026.
- Texas spent $51 billion on property tax relief and Austin homeowners got exactly nothing for it. Abbott himself admitted in February 2026 that prior relief efforts haven't "delivered lasting results" — Proposition 13 raised the homestead exemption to $140,000, but only for school district taxes, and a March 2026 Ownwell survey found 88% of Texas homeowners say the property tax process still negatively affects them.
- Tentative trial date set for Shane James Jr., accused in the 2025 Austin shooting spree. The case against the man charged in one of Austin's most violent recent crime sprees is finally moving toward a courtroom date, giving victims and the public a clearer timeline for accountability.
- Texas hemp industry wins a temporary court victory — smokable products can stay on shelves, for now. A Travis County judge lifted the smokable hemp ban temporarily on April 28, but the underlying three-day hearing is still underway and the full legal battle — with $7.2 billion and 36,000 jobs on the line — is far from resolved.
Texas's $10 Billion Hemp Industry Just Fought Back — And Won Round One
A Travis County judge temporarily lifted Texas's smokable hemp ban on April 28, handing a significant early victory to the industry in a three-day injunction hearing that began this week. The ruling came the same day CBS Austin reporter Adam Schwager was live-tweeting from the courtroom — and opened with a telling detail: the Texas AG's office moved to remove cameras from the courtroom, and the judge denied it. The underlying fight, however, is nowhere close to over. The existing temporary restraining order pausing enforcement expires Friday, May 1, and the battle over whether state agencies can rewrite hemp law through regulation — when the legislature explicitly refused to do it — is now moving toward what one observer on X estimated could be a multi-year legal slog.
The background is a story of regulatory overreach by bureaucratic fiat. Texas legalized hemp in 2019 under HB 1325 with a 0.3% delta-9 THC threshold. In 2025, the legislature passed Senate Bill 3 to tighten restrictions, but Gov. Abbott vetoed it. Two subsequent special sessions also failed to pass new hemp legislation. Then Abbott issued Executive Order GA-56 directing agencies to adopt "limited" public safety measures within existing law. DSHS took that executive order and ran with it — changing the THC calculation methodology to include THCA (tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, which becomes psychoactive when heated), effectively wiping out the smokable hemp market overnight. The industry's core legal argument is blunt and correct: "The agencies did through rulemaking what the Legislature declined to do through the democratic process." License fees got restructured too — manufacturer fees jumped from $250 to $10,000 per facility, retailer registrations from $150 to $5,000. Todd Harris, co-owner of Austin's Happy Cactus, testified that the newly banned THCA products represent 70% of his sales.
The economic stakes are concrete and enormous. Economist Beau Whitney testified that the hemp restrictions threaten $7.2 billion in annual losses and the elimination of roughly 36,000 jobs statewide. The Texas Hemp Business Council puts the broader industry footprint at $10 billion and 53,000 jobs. The state's counterargument — offered in their opening statement — was that "this is like plaintiffs trying to pass wine off as grape juice." That's a rhetorically satisfying line, but it doesn't answer the legal question: did DSHS exceed its statutory authority? If the judge agrees it did, Texas businesses will have survived a serious attempt to kill a legal industry by bureaucratic redesign. If not, the clock on May 1 becomes very loud very fast.
Sources: KVUE Austin, Texas Hemp Industry Lawsuit (Yahoo Finance), Bloomberg Law — $7.2B economist testimony, CBS Austin live courtroom reporting, State's opening argument, ABC13 Houston — ban temporarily lifted, Dallas Morning News — THCA rules background, Houston Chronicle — industry legal argument
Upcoming Events
- A Night With David Lee Roth. TONIGHT (April 29), 8 PM at ACL Live at The Moody Theater — the original Van Halen frontman, one night only.
- Maren Morris — The Dreamsicle Tour. Thursday, April 30, 7:30 PM at ACL Live at The Moody Theater — Austin's own country crossover star on her current tour, with opener slimdan.
- Kid Cudi — The Rebel Ragers Tour. Friday, May 1, 6:30 PM at Germania Insurance Amphitheater — special guests M.I.A., Big Boi, and A-Trak; a stacked bill at Austin's biggest outdoor venue.
- Band of Heathens — 20th Anniversary at Gruene Hall. This week, New Braunfels — the Austin-rooted roots rock institution celebrates two decades with a run at Gruene Hall, Texas's oldest dance hall, following a KUTX studio session this week.
Texas Is Becoming the Hardware Layer of the AI Economy
Two announcements dropped within 24 hours of each other, and together they tell a macro story that goes well beyond any single company. Galaxy Digital delivered its first live data hall to CoreWeave at its Helios campus in West Texas on April 28 — transitioning from construction to active, revenue-generating operations. Phase 1 is on track to deliver 133MW of critical IT capacity by end of Q2 2026, and the campus is approved to ultimately support 1.6 gigawatts of total capacity, making it one of the largest data center developments of its kind in North America. Galaxy's announcement pulled 1.18 million views on X within hours. The company was characteristically direct about what this moment means: "The single most important de-risking moment for Galaxy as we prove we can take a site from concept to operational AI data center. Execution is the moat." What they didn't say but clearly understood: nearly half of all US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or canceled. Lead times for power and infrastructure have stretched past five years. Helios just proved those constraints don't apply in West Texas.
The very next day, Core Scientific announced it is scaling its Pecos, Texas campus to 1.5 gigawatts of gross power (approximately 1.0GW leasable), converting what had been 300MW of active Bitcoin mining into AI colocation infrastructure. First capacity arrives in early 2027. The company has already acquired 200+ acres of additional land, locked in 300MW of incremental power under utility contract, and raised a staggering $4.3 billion in financing — $3.3B in senior secured notes plus a $1B Morgan Stanley credit facility. CEO Adam Sullivan's framing was pure Texas logic: "By expanding in a market where we already control power, infrastructure, and operations, we can execute with speed to meet market demand." The market agrees: CORZ shares are up 43% year-to-date, with analysts projecting 96% revenue growth this year.
What's happening here is structural, not cyclical. Bitcoin mining built the power contracts, the land positions, the grid interconnections, and the operational expertise across West Texas. Now AI is claiming that infrastructure at scale. Galaxy and Core Scientific are the two biggest announcements this week, but they're part of a broader wave — MARA Holdings, HIVE, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and Iren are all executing similar pivots. The combined planned capacity from Galaxy's Helios and Core Scientific's Pecos alone is 3.1 gigawatts. Texas didn't plan to become the physical substrate of the AI era. It just built the conditions — deregulated power markets, cheap land, heat-tolerant infrastructure culture — and the capital followed.
Sources: Galaxy Q1 2026 earnings (PR Newswire), Core Scientific Pecos expansion (Business Wire), Galaxy X announcement, Galaxy X context thread, Core Scientific — CoinMarketCap analysis
Weird Austin
- Yard Bar — Austin's beloved dog park bar — is closing after 11 years because the land underneath it got too expensive. The ownership said they found it "impossible to sustain operations" — a perfect, tidy sentence that summarizes what a decade of Austin land appreciation has actually cost at the neighborhood level.
- The Texas AG's office walked into a hemp injunction hearing and immediately tried to get the cameras removed — the judge said no. An agency trying to kill a $10 billion legal industry through regulatory redesign, and their opening move was to try to do it without anyone watching — the judge's answer was a preview of how the rest of the hearing went.
- Band of Heathens are celebrating 20 years as an Austin band with a KUTX studio session and a run at Gruene Hall. Texas's oldest dance hall, twenty years of Austin roots rock, the same week the city is becoming the physical backbone of the global AI compute infrastructure — the range of this state is genuinely unmatched.
One Thing
Texas is simultaneously arguing in court over what you can smoke and converting Bitcoin mines into 3.1 gigawatts of AI infrastructure. The range of this state is the whole point.
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