The Austin Daily News

By Justin Murphy

A daily update on tech, culture, and society in and around Austin, Texas.... more

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FAQs about The Austin Daily News:

How many episodes does The Austin Daily News have?

The podcast currently has 99 episodes available.

The Austin Daily News episodes:

June 07, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 7, 2026
In this week's issue:
The Texas grid's dirty secret: four groups of data centers already connected to ERCOT can each trigger a Boston-sized blackout — and just failed the test designed to prevent it
An elderly man beaten unconscious on an Austin street in broad daylight, police called, police never came — and the state of Texas has had enough
Flash flooding hit Cedar Park, Leander, and Georgetown overnight — nine rescues, dozens of roads closed, the San Gabriel River over flood stage
Elon Musk built a 16-foot fence around his Austin property with zero permits, while normal Austinites can't get a permit to get a permit
Let's get into it.
...more
17min
June 06, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 6, 2026
In this week's issue:
Texas's power grid has 410+ gigawatts of AI data center requests in the queue — five times the entire state's peak capacity
Austin City Hall has 176 communications staffers across 28 departments — and they don't communicate with each other — while the city bleeds $26M in budget red ink
Austin defense startup just hit a $2.2 billion valuation by making drone-killers that cost $10 per engagement
Two prominent Austin hotels foreclosed and a homebuilder sold at auction — the real estate market is separating winners from wishful thinkers
Texas just deregulated food trucks statewide, effective July 1 — one license to rule them all
Texas doesn't do things small. Let's get into it.
...more
17min
June 05, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 5, 2026
In this week's issue:
Texas just blew past California on the Fortune 500 — 57 companies vs. 56, $2.8 trillion in revenue — the throne is back
A cold case at Barton Springs Pool just cracked open: the same gun that killed a DoorDash driver in the parking lot in 2022 was used in a Houston murder one month later
Four Seasons closing an $870 million construction loan for Lake Austin residences starting at $4.6M — capital voting loudly
The city of Austin is trying to make a pushcart ice cream vendor get a Mobile Food Vendor permit
Let's get into it.
...more
18min
June 04, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 4, 2026
In this week's issue:
Tesla just expanded its Robotaxi service to the entire Austin metro — with roughly 25 cars covering a city of 1 million people
Austin ISD is cutting 558 positions and gutting benefits amid a $181 million deficit — while Tesla and SpaceX are building the future two hours away
Grimes County just handed Elon Musk a 100% tax abatement on a $119 billion semiconductor factory — a county with an $11 billion tax base
Project Connect was sold to Austin voters as 22 miles of light rail; it is now under 10 miles, costs $8.2 billion, and doesn't reach the airport
Let's get into it.
...more
20min
June 03, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 3, 2026
In this week's issue:
Samsung just abandoned a brand-new New Jersey HQ after eight months — moving its entire U.S. operation to Texas, becoming the second major company to flee NJ for the Lone Star State in a single week
Emo's is changing hands from Live Nation to AEG Presents in 2027 — full renovation, possible name change, and what it actually means for Austin's live music economy
SaveAustinNow delivered 20,514 petition signatures demanding a mandatory independent audit of every dollar Austin City Hall spends
Texas's new AV database dropped the first hard fleet numbers: Waymo has 577 robotaxis in Texas, Tesla has 42
Elijah Wood went to Alamo Drafthouse and immediately became the internet's favorite film bro
Let's do this.
...more
19min
June 02, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 2, 2026
In this week's issue:
Austin City Council just unlocked a pathway to 1,200-foot towers — taller than anything currently standing in Texas
An Austin Energy employee ran a fake vendor scheme for six years, pocketed nearly $1 million, and his supervisors signed off on every single invoice
Two major downtown hotels are hitting the Travis County foreclosure auction block on the same day
The San Antonio-to-Austin corridor now has 3,500 acres and 5+ gigawatts of compute infrastructure under development — and that number keeps climbing
Let's get into it.
...more
20min
June 01, 2026The Austin Daily News - June 1, 2026
In this week's issue:
The U.S. Secretary of Transportation inside Giga Texas with Elon Musk — calling for national AV standards that would blow open commercial robotaxi deployment everywhere
A 428-room Lady Bird Lake hotel hits foreclosure auction tomorrow after defaulting on $172M in debt — and the debt is underwater
Bar Peached on West 6th caught fire this morning, roof caved in, closed indefinitely
A 200-person West Texas town quietly becoming one of America's largest data center nodes
Let's get into it.
...more
20min
May 31, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 31, 2026
In this week's issue:
The $119 billion chip factory being built next to Giga Texas — and the Grimes County vote happening in three days that could greenlight the largest industrial construction project in American history
"Six-gender Jimmy" vs. "the most corrupt politician in Texas" — the Texas Senate general election is live, and the fundraising gap is genuinely insane
Austin ISD has 23 failing schools while Dallas and Houston have zero — and the state is three bad test scores away from seizing control of Austin's school board
Texas's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve just got a real committee, a custody RFP, and a June 15 deadline
Let's get into it.
...more
18min
May 30, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 30, 2026
In this week's issue:
Zach Dell's home battery startup just tripled to a $12B valuation in eight months — and the data center play is the whole story
Dell Technologies posted the most spectacular quarter in its history, 757% AI server revenue growth, and is voting to move its legal home to Texas on June 25
SpaceX drops $855M on Bastrop County to consolidate all Starlink kit production in Texas
Austin City Council just created a path for towers taller than anything in the state — developer skepticism is real, but the policy architecture for supertall Austin is now on paper
Willie Nelson, age 93, released his 79th solo studio album — and yes, the numbers get stranger from there
Let's get into it.
...more
20min
May 29, 2026The Austin Daily News - May 29, 2026
In this week's issue:
A Cybercab drove itself off the Giga Texas production line on the exact same day Texas legalized commercial Level 4 autonomous deployment — not coincidence, coordination
Bastrop County, population 115K, is quietly becoming one of the most consequential places on Earth for AI compute — EdgeConneX, Amazon, and the entire Musk universe are all converging on the same stretch of Texas highway
SpaceX rewrote AI training from scratch in bare-metal C for 220,000 GPUs, claiming a 10x speed advantage over Google's best tool
Austin's own city auditor just reported that more than two in five pedestrian deaths in Austin involve homeless individuals — and the city can't even reliably track where people are dying
The Line hotel on Lady Bird Lake, once a symbol of Austin's hospitality boom, goes to foreclosure auction on June 2
Let's get into it.
...more
16min

FAQs about The Austin Daily News:

How many episodes does The Austin Daily News have?

The podcast currently has 99 episodes available.