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🟪 ABIA sees strong first quarter, but rising fuel prices raise questions (Austin Business Journal)

🟪 Austin ISD begins parent meetings on boundary redraw ahead of 10 school closures (CBS News)

🟪 ‘The tech market is the story’: Economist says tech layoffs continue to weigh on Austin housing (KXAN)

🟪 Companies moving their legal homes to Texas is good PR, but don’t expect many new jobs (Texas Tribune)

🟪 Data centers could account for up to 9% of Texas water use by 2040, UT Austin report finds (KUT)

🟪 State auditor flags DMV for shortcomings in protecting drivers’ information (KXAN)

🟪 Texas Republicans spent years courting Indian voters. Then came talk of the “Indian takeover.” (Texas Tribune)

🟪 In a trial pitting him against Elon Musk, nobody has more to lose than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Associated Press)

✅ ABIA sees strong first quarter, but rising fuel prices raise questions (Austin Business Journal)

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport has seen a strong start to the year with more passenger and cargo traffic, but has a cloudy outlook with rising fuel prices. 

The airport reported it saw a roughly 5.8% year-over-year increase in its passenger totals for the first three months of 2026. In total, ABIA had 4.89 million passengers in the first quarter of 2026. Over the same period in 2025, the airport had 4.62 million passengers. 

ABIA saw growth both in domestic and international passengers. ABIA’s domestic passenger totals rose by 5.6% to 4.66 million. Its international passenger count jumped 10.1% to 223,000.

ABIA also reported that its overall cargo totals increased by 1.9% for the first quarter of 2026. The international cargo volume at ABIA increased by 4.9%, while domestic cargo totals rose by 1.5%… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Austin ISD begins parent meetings on boundary redraw ahead of 10 school closures (CBS News)

Austin ISD parents are getting their first look at the district’s plan to redraw school boundaries ahead of 10 school closures at the end of the school year, a move district leaders say is meant to better align feeder patterns and strengthen neighborhood schools.

Monday’s meeting at McCallum High School was the first in a series of community meetings on proposed boundary changes before the district votes on the plan in September. The boundary changes would take effect in August 2027.

The 10 schools are set to close because of Austin ISD’s budget deficit and declining enrollment. The district is working to relocate students from those campuses into new schools for next year, and officials say boundary changes are intended to help manage shifting enrollment and relieve campuses expected to take in more students… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ ‘The tech market is the story’: Economist says tech layoffs continue to weigh on Austin housing (KXAN)

Tech layoffs continue to weigh on the Austin housing market as prices dropped to their lowest March level since 2021.

Across the first quarter, prices are down 3.4% to a median sales price of $415,300, according to the Austin Board of Realtors.

Texas housing economist Amy Nixon said tech layoffs have an outsized impact on cities like Austin where a disproportionate number of workers are employed by tech. So far in 2026, tech companies have laid off nearly 103,000 workers, according to layoffs.fyi.

As a result, there are fewer people with good incomes who are able to purchase homes as they come onto the market... 🟪 (READ MORE)

📝⏱️ Q2 2026 Survey: 5 minutes, 9 questions. Click here to share your input.

✅ Companies moving their legal homes to Texas is good PR, but don’t expect many new jobs (Texas Tribune)

When Dell Technologies announced its board of directors recommended a change of the company’s incorporation from Delaware to Texas this month, state officials were quick to celebrate.

“This is what happens when job creators and innovators are welcomed, not punished,” Gov. Greg Abbott wrote in a statement. “More businesses are sure to follow.”

Readers may be forgiven for thinking Dell was already located in Texas, given the existence of its headquarters in Round Rock for decades and founding more than 40 years ago on the University of Texas at Austin campus.

Abbott was celebrating the company’s decision to move its legal home rather than its physical home, from Delaware, the legal home to nearly 70% of all Fortune 500 companies, to Texas. Dell’s reincorporation here will mean it will be subject to Texas’ legal and tax regulations, so that shareholder lawsuits against the company, regardless of where they originate, would have to play out in more business-friendly Texas.

Dell’s announcement to reincorporate from Delaware, where its legal home has been since 1988, follows a similar decision in March by the ExxonMobil board of directors to recommend reincorporating the Spring-headquartered oil and gas company to Texas, from New Jersey. Tesla, Space X and Coinbase are among major U.S. companies to redomicile in Texas in recent years.

“I think we’re going to see more,” said state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola and an architect of several recent changes to state law aimed at attracting more corporations to the state. “Delaware has been the default state of incorporation for decades. So it’s not going to change next week, but it’s changing.”

Despite the fanfare over each announcement, Dell and Exxon’s reincorporations will change little for the state, said Ann Lipton, a law professor at University of Colorado Boulder who studies corporate governance… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Data centers could account for up to 9% of Texas water use by 2040, UT Austin report finds (KUT)

Texas' booming data center industry could dramatically increase pressure on the state's water supply in the coming years, according to new research from the University of Texas at Austin.

A report released last week estimates data centers could account for between 3% and 9% of Texas' total water use by 2040 — up from less than 1% today.

The findings come as Texas sees a boom in data center construction, driven largely by the rise of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Researchers at UT say more than 400 data centers are already operating or being built across the state.

"There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the water use for data centers," said Mariam Arzumanyan, a fellow at the Bureau of Economic Geology at UT Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences.

Data centers use water to cool massive computer servers. They also require large amounts of electricity, and generating that electricity often uses water, too. But researchers say it's still unclear exactly how much water the industry will ultimately use since different facilities rely on different cooling systems and energy sources… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ State auditor flags DMV for shortcomings in protecting drivers’ information (KXAN)

A report released by the Texas State Auditor’s Office on Monday states that the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles needs to make major changes to how it releases and stores Texas drivers’ data.

The report notes that DMV officials agreed to the SAO’s recommendations and that fixes were already underway.

A “priority” issue flagged by the SAO was how the DMV contracts its data disclosures to companies. This sort of disclosure is necessary for insurance claims or so tow companies can notify a car’s owner.

The problem, per the SAO, was that 22 of the DMVs contracts and 18 bulk data contracts lacked provisions that prevent or punish “the redisclosure of records to unauthorized recipients.”

These would have prevented unauthorized re-release of DMV data to a third party. So, a company could get data from the DMV, then send it on to a party that wasn’t under contract with the DMV… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Texas Republicans spent years courting Indian voters. Then came talk of the “Indian takeover.” (Texas Tribune)

Burt Thakur is a U.S. citizen, a Navy veteran and a Trump supporter. Last year, he was elected to be a strong conservative voice on the City Council in the booming Dallas suburb of Frisco. 

Lately, that job has required Thakur, who was born in New Delhi, to sit on the dais at Frisco City Hall and listen as a steady stream of people hurl racist invective at him and the entire Indian community. The speakers, many of whom don’t live in Frisco, rail against invaders, anchor babies, H-1B visa fraud and the “Indian takeover” of a city where nearly one in five residents are Indian. 

Dylan Law, a McKinney resident who grew up in Frisco, told the council in early February that the city was falling to “unchosen, unwanted and uninvited forces.” 

“Be America First,” Law implored the council, to audience cheers. “And to those who abuse the system my people built, go home before you are sent back.” 

Over the last few months, Frisco has become the unwilling backdrop for a larger conflict between Republicans’ nascent relationship with Indian American voters, and the party’s rising nativist strain, which rejects anyone not born here, including naturalized citizens.

The same faction that’s been targeting Muslims over the specter of Sharia law has turned its hostility toward Texas’ growing Indian community, accusing them of exploiting the H-1B visa program to steal American jobs and undercut wages... 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ Tiny data centers may be coming into the homes of Americans in the future (CNBC)

Data centers are gobbling up land, driving up electric bills, and becoming a lightning rod for public discontent over big tech’s power in society. Maine’s legislature recently passed a data center ban in the state (but failed to override the governor’s veto).

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states spanning the political spectrum from Oklahoma to New York are considering legislation that would ban or pause new data centers, as public opinion on AI has increasingly shifted to the negative. Still, despite the qualms of the public and politicians, there’s a torrent of capital for building new data centers.

The biggest technology companies in the U.S. are on pace to spend as much as $1 trillion annually by 2027 on AI, according to recent Wall Street estimates. Globally, a recent McKinsey report forecasts spending on data centers will hit $7 trillion by 2030.

At the same time, the idea of putting data centers closer to consumers, even onto and into their homes, is gaining traction in real estate circles. Major players in housing, including homebuilder PulteGroup, are in early testing with Nvidia and California-based startup Span to install small fractional data center “nodes” on the exterior walls of newly built homes, according to recent reporting from CNBC’s Diana Olick.

The question of whether that model can scale, and whether homeowners, HOAs, and regulators will approve it, is up for debate. Experts point to some benefits to home-based data centers, with the home-based grid allowing for less construction needed on new ones and greater energy efficiency.

“It is technically possible and already being explored,” said Balaji Tammabattula, chief operating officer at BaRupOn, a U.S.-based energy and technology company currently building out a data center campus in Liberty County, Texas. He said just as a home computer can contribute processing power to a distributed network, a home can host compute hardware that feeds into a larger data processing system. The home-as-data-center model would follow similar attempts at using latent home power for crypto mining or to sell excess rooftop solar power or EV credits… 🟪 (READ MORE)

✅ In a trial pitting him against Elon Musk, nobody has more to lose than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Associated Press)

In a trial featuring a clash between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, neither of the tech titans has emerged as an overly sympathetic character. But nobody has more to lose than Altman, who is expected to take the stand this week to defend himself.

Already, testimony about Altman’s turbulent tenure at the ChatGPT maker has become prime fodder for internet jokes. One piece of evidence that has inspired countless memes was a text exchange between Altman and a company officer, Mira Murati, in 2023 during his short-lived ouster as CEO, when Altman asked if things were moving “directionally good or bad” and she wrote back: “Sam this is very bad.”

Musk, the world’s richest man, is seeking Altman’s second ouster from the company leadership as part of a civil lawsuit accusing him of betraying their shared vision for OpenAI. Since its start as a nonprofit funded primarily by Musk, Open AI has evolved into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852 billion… 🟪 (READ MORE)