In this week's issue:

  • A $2 billion AI data center deal in West Texas just vaporized — and what CoreWeave did next changes how the whole sector finances itself
  • Dan Patrick wants Texas to hold bitcoin as a state asset and ban Kalshi as gambling, in the same breath
  • Tesla robotaxi crossed the Colorado River into downtown Austin for the first time — but the viral "94 vehicles" number is a lie
  • Austin Energy is routing money out the door while hiking your property taxes in a market that's already down 20%
  • Sysco is buying Restaurant Depot, which means your favorite food truck just lost its only alternative supplier

Texas keeps building. The politics keep getting stranger. Let's get into it.

Quick Top Stories

Top Stories

Feature #1

Texas AI Infrastructure's First Big Casualty

In October 2025, Poolside and CoreWeave announced Project Horizon — a 2GW AI data center campus on 568 acres in West Texas's Permian Basin, with CoreWeave as the anchor tenant and a reported $2 billion funding round (described in sourcing as Nvidia-led, though this was not independently verified) attached to the deal. It was the kind of announcement that fit neatly into the Texas AI triumphalism of late 2025, when $7.5 billion in commitments were landing in the state in a single week. Six months later, it's dead. Poolside failed to deliver the first 250MW GPU cluster on CoreWeave's timeline, triggering a mutual termination in early 2026. The $2 billion round collapsed with it. Poolside is now actively shopping for new anchor partners with no replacement confirmed.

CoreWeave, for its part, did not blink. Instead of hunting for another single-tenant mega-deal, the company executed a strategic pivot: on March 31, 2026, Bloomberg Law confirmed CoreWeave raised $8.5 billion in chip-backed debt — described as the largest deal of its kind — secured by GPU hardware and a customer contract with Meta worth at least $19 billion. The structure is the point. Rather than betting its infrastructure buildout on a single anchor tenant (which is exactly what failed with Poolside), CoreWeave is now running flexible multi-tenant leasing underwritten by a creditworthy hyperscaler contract. The Meta deal functions as the anchor that Poolside was supposed to be — but with a counterparty that can actually perform.

The lesson here isn't that Texas AI infrastructure is collapsing — it isn't. Texas separately approved the largest permitted data center campus in the US as of February 2026, and the state's structural advantages in land, power access, and permitting remain intact. The lesson is that announcements are not infrastructure. The capital structure of AI buildout is evolving fast, and single-anchor mega-campus deals appear to be the fragile model. CoreWeave's pivot toward credit-backed, multi-tenant leasing — with real contracted revenue as the foundation — may be the more durable template. The gap between Texas AI ambition and Texas AI execution is real, and Project Horizon is the clearest data point yet.

Sources: Project Horizon Announcement — Poolside, Poolside Seeks Partners After CoreWeave Deal Falls Apart — Data Center Dynamics, CoreWeave Raises $8.5B GPU Loan Backed by Meta Deal — Bloomberg Law, CoreWeave/Poolside Collapse Summary

Upcoming Events

  • ATX Musicians Night Shift. Free music industry mixer at How Much?! Studios on April 8 — BYOB, open mic, JewBoy Burgers food truck on-site, industry people in the room, RSVP on Eventbrite.
  • The Format with Ben Kweller and Limbeck. ACL Live at the Moody Theater, Wednesday April 8, doors at 6:50PM — all ages, presented by ACL Live and C3.
  • ABC Kite Fest. Austin's oldest kite competition returns to Zilker Park on Saturday April 11, 10AM–5PM — free, with live music, kids activities, and a pet zone.
  • Lissie with Hannah Connolly. The 04 Center, Saturday April 11, doors 7PM — all ages, GA $35, VIP $50.
  • Austin Psych Fest 2026. The Far Out Lounge, May 8–10 — headlined by The Flaming Lips, Thee Sacred Souls, and The Black Angels; three-day and single-day tickets available now.
  • Lone Star Festival 2026. October 23–25 in Austin — celebrating Texas independent creators across art, books, movies, and music; free tickets and vendor spots still available.

Feature #2

The Bitcoin-Reserve State Just Declared War on Prediction Markets

On March 27, 2026, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick released his 2026 interim charges to the Texas Senate — a set of directives telling committees what to study before the January 2027 legislative session. One of those charges, directed to the Senate State Affairs Committee, takes aim at prediction markets. Patrick's exact language: "the sudden inundation of prediction market gambling" and "the exploitation of federal law to circumvent Texas gambling prohibitions by allowing users to place bets on the outcome of elections and other events." The targets are Kalshi and Polymarket, the two dominant platforms in the CFTC-regulated prediction market space. Patrick is the same official who has blocked sports betting in Texas for years, who has watched Las Vegas Sands lobbying campaigns die in the Texas legislature session after session, and who now wants to use the State Affairs Committee to build the legal framework for restricting platforms that are federally licensed derivatives markets — not gambling operations.

Here is the contradiction that deserves to be stated plainly: the same Texas conservative majority that embraced bitcoin as a state asset is now framing CFTC-regulated prediction markets as illegal gambling. Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 21 in June 2025, creating the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Texas was the first state to actually fund it — purchasing approximately $5 million in bitcoin through BlackRock's IBIT ETF in November 2025. Bitcoin is a volatile, speculative digital asset with no yield, no regulatory oversight as a financial instrument, and a price history that would make any risk manager faint. Prediction markets, by contrast, are federally regulated commodity derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act, with active CFTC oversight, and they function as genuine price-discovery and epistemic tools. Texas bought bitcoin with public money and called it visionary. Patrick is calling Kalshi gambling. The logical consistency here is nonexistent.

The timeline gives industry roughly nine months to respond before the session opens. More than a dozen states and federal lawmakers have introduced similar bills targeting prediction markets in 2025–2026, so Patrick is not operating in isolation — but Texas is the largest no-sports-betting state in the country, and its population likely represents a massive share of total platform volume. Active lawsuits testing whether federal commodity law preempts state gambling statutes are working their way through courts in Arizona and Nevada, and analysts expect the question to reach the Supreme Court. The 2027 session is the first real legislative threat; no restrictions can take effect before mid-2027 at the earliest. But Patrick has now put the platforms on notice, and for Austin's investor and builder class that uses prediction markets as a core information tool, this is a fight worth watching — and funding the opposition to.

Sources: Dan Patrick 2026 Interim Charges — ltgov.texas.gov, Lt. Gov. Patrick Releases Interim Charges — ltgov.texas.gov, Texas Bitcoin Reserve $5M Purchase — Washington Examiner, Texas Prediction Markets Legislative Charges Summary

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Thanks for reading. Texas keeps getting stranger and more interesting at the same time. Glad you're here for it.

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