In this week's issue:

  • 410 gigawatts of data center power requests queued up in Texas — and a radical private-capital fix that could cut the line entirely
  • Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet rolling unsupervised after dark for the first time, while the Cybercab comes off the Giga Texas line
  • A Cinco de Mayo restaurant shooting that left one dead and four injured, and Austin's 28th fatal crash of 2026 on South Lamar
  • Tom Segura opens an Italian bakery with a former Italian Navy SEAL, because this is Austin and nothing makes sense in the best way

Let's get into it.

Top Stories

"Bring Your Own Power" — The Idea That Could Reshape Texas Data Centers

Here is the number that stops any conversation cold: ERCOT is currently tracking 410 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests — nearly five times the Texas grid's all-time peak demand of roughly 85 GW. Of that queue, 87% comes from data centers. Oncor alone is sitting on 650 large-load requests totaling 273 GW. These aren't approved projects; much of it is speculative pipeline. But even if a fraction of it materializes, Texas's power infrastructure faces a reckoning it is not currently built to handle. Into this mess walks a genuinely Texan solution. A May 6 op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman by Glen Lyons (ExxonMobil retiree, former ERCOT board member) and Nicole Nosek (chair of Texans for Reasonable Solutions) lays out the "Bring Your Own Power" concept: let data centers fund and build their own private, independent power systems — bypassing ERCOT grid interconnection entirely. No public utility queue, no cost-sharing imposed on Texas ratepayers, no 6-to-12-month legal delay eating $500,000 to $1 million in attorney fees per project. Private capital solves a private-capital problem. The idea isn't hypothetical — New Hampshire, Utah, and Oklahoma have already passed BYOP-style laws in 2025. Texas hasn't. There is no bill filed yet; Lyons and Nosek are calling for one to pass "next session" (regular legislative sessions happen in odd years, so 2027 unless a special session is called). But the political momentum is real: Public Utility Commission Chairman Thomas Gleeson endorsed the concept before a state Senate panel on April 1, calling "bring your own generation" a significant part of the grid strategy.

The stakes for Central Texas are not abstract. More than 70 data centers are planned, built, or operating between Temple and San Antonio. The Austin-San Antonio corridor alone is expected to draw 5,600 megawatts simultaneously from centers already under construction — and ERCOT projects a 71% surge in total Texas energy demand by 2031 driven by this buildout. The Samsung Taylor campus in Taylor, TX — now ramping equipment installation for Tesla's AI5 and AI6 chips on a $44 billion, 2-nanometer fab — is one piece of that picture. The broader AI hardware buildout happening across Central Texas is exactly what's pressuring the grid. The Dallas Federal Reserve has warned that "even a modest data center boom could substantially raise retail electricity prices" for ordinary Texans. That's the political tension Rep. Chris Turner pressed the PUC chairman on: "Is it the goal of the commission to make sure data center activity does not increase electricity costs for our constituents?" BYOP is the answer that threads the needle — Texas gets to be the global AI infrastructure hub while protecting residential ratepayers from subsidizing hyperscale compute. If this gets legislation in 2027, it could make Texas the fastest place on earth to stand up a data center. That's not a modest claim. It's a Texas one.

Sources: Austin American-Statesman — BYOP Op-Ed, Texas Policy Research — House State Affairs Hearing, CNHI News — PUC Chairman Gleeson quote, Statesman — Central Texas data center power demand, Samsung Taylor — Tesla AI chip fab

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Tesla's Robotaxi Runs Austin After Dark

As of May 4, Tesla's Austin robotaxi fleet crossed a threshold it hadn't before: unsupervised operation after dark. For nearly a year after launching in Austin, the fleet was capped at mid-afternoon hours — a meaningful limitation when the whole point of a commercial robotaxi is to own peak demand hours, which run evening through late night. That ceiling is now gone. Fleet trackers confirmed the expansion by May 5, with Austin's unsupervised count jumping to 25 vehicles (up from 19 just a week prior), joined by 6 in Houston and 5 in Dallas for 36 unsupervised vehicles total across Texas. The timing matters: evening hours are when Waymo and traditional rideshare do their heaviest business. For Tesla to even contest those hours is a prerequisite for commercial viability.

The honest competitive picture, though, demands context. Waymo runs approximately 200 fully driverless vehicles in Austin alone — roughly eight times Tesla's unsupervised Austin fleet — across a 133-square-mile service zone, generating roughly 500,000 paid rides per week nationally. Tesla's 25-car Austin operation is not yet a business; it's an advanced proof-of-concept. The bull case is structural, not current: Tesla's pure-vision approach (no lidar, no expensive sensor arrays) and the sub-$30,000 Cybercab economics — now entering continuous production at Giga Texas in Austin after the first unit rolled off the line in February — represent a radically cheaper unit cost that Waymo cannot match. Musk is being honest about the ramp: production will be "very slow" initially, he said on Q1 earnings, describing a "stretched-out S-curve going exponential toward the end of the year." FSD v15, described internally as a complete architectural overhaul, is the unlock for mass commercial rollout — and it isn't expected until end of 2026 or early 2027. Fifteen NHTSA crash reports since the June 2025 Austin launch; no new reports submitted between February 18 and March 16. The safety record is clean so far, and the direction of the technology — evening operations, fleet growth, factory production — is unambiguously forward. Austin is where the Cybercab is being built and where it's learning to drive at night. That's the story.

Sources: Tesla Robotaxi Evening Operations — X, Fleet tracker data — Herbert Ong on X, Electrek — Fleet ramp-up, Not a Tesla App — FSD v15 timeline, The Verge — Cybercab production, Statesman — Waymo vs. Tesla Austin

Weird Austin

One Thing

Texas is simultaneously debating how to power the next decade of AI infrastructure — 410 gigawatts in the queue, private capital ready to build — and putting unsupervised robot cars on Austin streets after dark. The physical future is being assembled here, right now, one policy fight and one factory shift at a time.

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