One of the great but overlooked things about Texas is its knack for joining early in important trends, becoming a leader in oil, gas, music, tech, renewable energy, and now artificial intelligence and its companion industry, semiconductors.
Texas has actually been one of the American leaders in electronics for years, with its venerable home state research and development pioneer Texas Instruments, which was among the first in electronics development for the past 75 years.
But now the semiconductor industry is experiencing explosive growth, and Tex Clouser of PCA Technical Solutions says it will likely this year pass $1 trillion in revenue for the first time.
He says Texans are positioned, "just as they are in the financial space, to be a leader in the technical space as well."
Whopping amounts of money are being poured into semiconductor, computer chip, and other research, testing and manufacturing, and Texas will be getting much of that funding from federal and private sources as the US competes with China for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI).
Chips are a prime market for AI, and one of the prime requirements for AI is semiconductors, so a number of chip-building plants are planned for Texas, all part of an emerging set of systems.
"It's become almost an entire system, when we think about what we need for AI, it's not just about GPUs but it's about the whole packaging of it all," Clouser says.
"And you've got huge federal incentives with chips really pouring in to incentivize building here" in the state of Texas.