Austin Daily: April 2, 2026

In this week's issue:

• Stargate just got a street address in Austin — a SoftBank-linked entity quietly bought the old 3M campus, and the "Cosmos" codename in state filings tells you everything you need to know
• An Austin company closed a $90M round where its own customers wrote the checks — and turned 0% AI-assisted code to 50%+ in one year at a global PE firm
• Texas is about to dethrone Northern Virginia as the world's largest data center market, and Austin's vacancy rate is basically zero
• A 35-year-old hidden "fee" inside your utility bill just got sued out of existence — or at least someone is trying
• Three UT freshmen built a brain-reading headband because apparently nobody in medicine thought to actually measure pain before

Let's get into it.

Quick Top Stories

Top Stories

• Texas is on pace to dethrone Northern Virginia as the world's largest data center market by 2030. Austin alone sits at 645 MW with 3,250 MW projected, a 0.6% vacancy rate, and nearly 20 projects underway — ABJ also published what it calls the most comprehensive map of Austin-area data centers available to visualize the density.
• TPPF filed suit against Austin over the $139M Transportation User Fee, arguing it's an unconstitutional tax that's been hiding in utility bills since 1991. Filed in Travis County District Court, the lawsuit challenges 35 years of unchecked collection — including an 11% hike in fiscal 2026 that happened even as Austin Energy's actual energy costs fell.
• Austin ranks #10 nationally in pre-seed capital per Carta data — a surprising gap for a city that just posted a record $7.19B in VC. The tension suggests Austin is world-class at scaling companies but may be underbuilding the early-stage founder density that produces them in the first place.
• Austin City Council approved 100 IKE Smart City kiosks for downtown — $6.3M in projected annual ad revenue, zero taxpayer cost, and free directory listings for local businesses. Council overrode the Planning Commission's formal objection and approved the program anyway; first units are expected downtown by fall 2026.
• A 1.5–2 million square foot industrial development is coming to the Austin area. At that scale — larger than most traditional industrial parks — this points toward data center-adjacent, semiconductor supply chain, or major logistics infrastructure rather than standard commercial development.

Feature #1

Stargate Just Got an Austin Address

The former 3M campus at 6801 River Place Blvd in northwest Austin — 107 acres, 1.1 million square feet — was quietly transferred to SE Cosmos LLC, an entity sharing an address with SoftBank-backed SB Energy, the infrastructure arm of the $500B Stargate AI venture. Travis County deed records confirmed the transfer on April 1. The campus, now branded Highpoint 2222, was last appraised at $129.28 million (up from $97M just a year prior), though the actual sale price hasn't been disclosed. The acquisition wasn't a surprise to those paying close attention: state TDLR filings had already revealed plans for a $610M renovation targeting a 234,000 sqft buildout codenamed "Cosmos," with sweeping electrical upgrades consistent with data center conversion. The codename now has an owner.

This is SB Energy's second major Texas footprint — and the two sites serve very different functions. In Milam County (Rosebud, TX), SB Energy is developing a 1.2 GW data center across 606 acres for OpenAI, an estimated $18 billion campus that is raw hyperscale compute at industrial scale. The Austin campus is something different: 1.1 million square feet of existing office stock doesn't become a hyperscale data hall, it becomes the operational and engineering HQ for a Stargate-adjacent footprint — the brains to Milam County's brawn. SB Energy has been capitalizing fast: $2.4 billion raised total ($800M from Ares in 2025, $1B from OpenAI and SoftBank in January 2026), and the acquisition of Studio 151, an in-house construction company with a 20-campus track record, to compress build timelines. From capital raise to Austin property acquisition in under one quarter is not a normal pace. These people are moving.

The open question for Austin is permitting. This newsletter has covered the city's permitting dysfunction in the last two issues — SB Energy's SoftBank backing and OpenAI relationship give it more political capital than any developer who's been ground down by city bureaucrats lately, but the structural friction is real. Site plan applications were filed with the City of Austin in March. If Austin can get out of its own way, the Stargate buildout plants the single largest AI infrastructure flag in the city's history. If it can't, that flag goes somewhere else.

Sources: Austin American-Statesman · The Real Deal / TDLR filings · SB Energy / OpenAI official press release · Baxtel — Milam County specs · Austin Business Journal · AI Business

Upcoming Events

• Moontower Comedy Festival 2026: New York's Finest at Antone's. April 17, 9pm (doors 8:30pm), 18+, part of Moontower's two-week run (April 8–19) featuring 150+ comedians across 10+ downtown venues — this Club Series show pulls a nine-comic NYC lineup including Mike Vecchione and Shane Torres.
• Founders Academy at Capital Factory. Two-day intensive April 22–23 led by Gordon Daugherty covering the early decisions that determine whether a startup works — registration via Capital Factory, designed for pre-product and pre-revenue founders.
• Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition at UT Austin. May 1, free public RSVP via Eventbrite — graduate student founders pitch real investors, one of Austin's most accessible early-stage deal flow windows for anyone looking to scout or support the next generation of builders.

Feature #2

Coder's $90M Series C: When Your Customers Write the Check

Austin-based Coder — founded in 2017, built by the co-creators of code-server (117.8K GitHub stars) — just closed a $90 million Series C led by KKR. The headline number is not the story. The story is who else wrote checks: KKR itself and QRT (Qube Research & Technologies), two of Coder's largest enterprise customers, both invested directly. This is the kind of product-market fit signal that makes other investors irrelevant. KKR deployed Coder to 500+ engineers and went from zero AI-assisted code to more than 50% of all commits happening inside Coder-managed environments in a single year. QRT, a quantitative trading firm, rolled Coder out to 1,000+ of its 2,000 employees. When a global PE firm and a major quant shop not only use your product but then write a growth-stage check into your company, the due diligence is already done — they're paying you with their own infrastructure.

What Coder actually does is important to understand: it provides governed cloud development environments where both human developers and AI coding agents operate under the same policy layer. Think of it as the plumbing for the AI coding revolution — a neutral substrate that lets enterprises run Claude Code, Cursor, and other coding agents at scale without losing governance, security, or auditability. The platform supports air-gapped deployments for the U.S. DoD and intelligence agencies. CEO Rob Whiteley (ex-GM of F5 NGINX) calls it "rearchitecting the foundation for how enterprise software is built." The numbers back that up: 300% year-over-year bookings growth over the past four quarters, 148% YoY in Q1 2026 alone, and 184% net dollar retention — meaning existing customers are spending dramatically more over time. That last number is the one that matters most for long-term value.

The broader signal here is Austin's emerging role not just as an AI user city but as an AI infrastructure producer. Coder isn't building another LLM wrapper or a demo-day product — it's defining the enterprise governance layer for agentic AI workflows, a category that barely existed two years ago, from Austin. The platform engineering market is projected to hit $23.9 billion by 2030 at a 23.7% CAGR. Coder is not chasing that market. It is, at the moment, creating it.

Sources: Coder official blog · GlobeNewswire / Yahoo Finance · TAMradar · TradedVC on X · Pulse2

Weird Austin

• Three UT pre-med freshmen built a brain-reading headband that objectively measures pain — because apparently the medical field has been fine with a 1-to-10 guess scale for decades. Their startup, SynapSense Technologies, uses EEG electrodes to read brain electrical signals and won $5,000 in seed funding at UT's Builder's Bullpen — now pursuing FDA approval.
• Austin's Planning Commission called 100 digital kiosks a "seismic change" to public advertising rules and formally recommended against them — City Council approved them anyway because the city gets $6.3M a year for free. The Planning Commission's concern that this sets a precedent for public space advertising is technically correct; the City Council's position that free money is hard to argue with is also technically correct.
• Austin founder @austinxwalker dropped a widely-shared thread arguing most founders are building features with shelf lives instead of betting on inevitable futures. The core line — "pick a future you believe is inevitable and build into it before anyone else sees it" — is the most honest description of what Coder, SB Energy, and every other company in this issue is actually doing.

The Exit

One Thing

Stargate just put a flag in the ground at 6801 River Place Blvd. That's your city. Forward this to one person in tech, real estate, or finance who needs to know that — because they probably don't yet.

• Reply with what you think happens next with Austin's permitting process on this one
• Share this issue on X if the Coder or Stargate story hit for you

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