Austin: the Silicon Valley of the future
The American Computer Society is headquartered in Austin, Texas, at the center of the Texas Tech Triangle — the convergence of semiconductors, artificial intelligence, autonomous transport, space exploration and the energy that powers all of it. We placed the national society, chartered by Congress, where the profession's next fifty years are being built.
$17B+
Samsung's Taylor fab investment
4 metros
Austin, DFW, Houston, San Antonio
#1
US state for wind generation
Horizon
Largest US academic supercomputer, in build
The convergence
No other American region puts fabrication, frontier compute, autonomy, launch capability and an independent power grid inside a single day's drive. That convergence is why ACS registers, certifies and convenes the profession from here.
Semiconductors
The oldest layer of Central Texas tech, and the one being rebuilt at national scale.
- Samsung Austin Semiconductor has operated in northeast Austin since 1996 and is building a new fab complex in Taylor, Texas — an initial investment of more than $17 billion, supported under the CHIPS and Science Act, with roughly 1,800 direct jobs in its first decade.
- NXP Semiconductors runs two wafer fabs in Austin; Infineon, Tokyo Electron and Applied Materials all hold significant Central Texas operations.
- Austin-headquartered fabless leaders include Silicon Labs and Cirrus Logic; AMD, Intel, Arm, Qualcomm and Apple silicon teams all design here.
- Texas Instruments anchors the northern corner of the Triangle from Dallas–Richardson, with new 300mm fabs in Sherman.
AI & compute
Frontier model training, hyperscale capacity and open academic supercomputing in one metro.
- The Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin operates Frontera and Vista, and is building Horizon — designed as the largest academic supercomputer in the United States under the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility.
- Dell Technologies, headquartered in Round Rock, is one of the world's largest suppliers of AI training infrastructure.
- Oracle's Austin waterfront campus, Apple's $1B+ North Austin campus at Parmer, IBM Austin, Google, Meta and Amazon give the metro deep hyperscaler and enterprise engineering density.
- xAI and other frontier labs have anchored Texas compute build-outs, alongside the multi-gigawatt Stargate data center program in Abilene.
Transport & autonomy
Austin is the most heavily instrumented autonomy testbed in the country.
- Tesla's global headquarters and Gigafactory Texas sit at Del Valle, on the eastern edge of Austin.
- Waymo and Zoox operate driverless fleets on Austin streets; Tesla's robotaxi program launched here first.
- The Boring Company is headquartered in Bastrop, thirty miles east, building tunnelling systems for urban transit.
- Project Connect light rail, the Austin-Bergstrom terminal expansion and the proposed Dallas–Houston high-speed corridor knit the Triangle into one labor market.
Space exploration
Texas now covers the full stack: launch, satellites, mission control and off-world construction.
- Firefly Aerospace, headquartered in Cedar Park, builds Alpha launch vehicles and the Blue Ghost lunar lander.
- CesiumAstro (Austin) builds phased-array communications payloads; Slingshot Aerospace works space-domain awareness from Austin.
- ICON, an Austin 3D-construction company, has developed lunar surface construction technology with NASA.
- SpaceX operates Starbase on the Gulf Coast and a Starlink manufacturing facility in Bastrop; Blue Origin launches from West Texas; NASA's Johnson Space Center flies human spaceflight from Houston.
Energy, grid & industry
Compute is now an energy business, and Texas runs its own grid.
- ERCOT, the independent operator of the Texas grid, is headquartered in Taylor — the same town as Samsung's new fab.
- Texas leads the nation in wind generation and is among the leaders in utility-scale solar and battery storage, the physical substrate of AI data centers.
- Houston's energy engineering base is pivoting hard into grid, hydrogen and industrial decarbonization software.
The Tech Triangle
Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio form the Texas Triangle: four complementary technology economies holding the large majority of the state's population, connected by interstate, air and — soon — high-speed rail.
Austin
Software, semiconductors, autonomy, venture
The Triangle's engineering capital: chip fabs, AI infrastructure, Tesla, Dell, and a startup density that now rivals any US metro outside the Bay Area.
Dallas–Fort Worth
Telecom, enterprise, logistics, chips
AT&T's headquarters, the Richardson telecom corridor, Texas Instruments, and the aviation and logistics spine of the region.
Houston
Space, energy, medicine
NASA Johnson Space Center, the world's energy capital, and the Texas Medical Center — the largest medical complex on earth.
San Antonio
Cybersecurity and defense
One of the largest concentrations of cyber operations talent in the country, around military and federal cyber commands and Port San Antonio.
Mapping the new Silicon Valley
The Texas Tech Triangle at a glance: Austin at the western point, Dallas–Fort Worth to the north, Houston to the southeast and San Antonio to the southwest — with the ACS headquarters marked at 600 Congress Avenue in downtown Austin.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Marker: ACS headquarters, Austin, Texas.
Our Austin headquarters
American Computer Society
600 Congress Avenue, Suite 1400
Austin, TX 78701
Member services and the national assessment office operate from Austin, Monday to Friday, 9am–6pm CT.
What we run from here
- The national register of certified computing professionals.
- Chapter programs across the four Triangle metros and 52 chapters nationwide.
- Semiconductor, AI assurance and autonomy special interest groups.
- Policy advice to state and federal bodies on computing in the public interest.