Following the AI Money: Recent Bets on Tech and Datacenters in Texas

Hi, this week, we're following the AI money, big checks, power deals, and the Texas build out.

So $10 billion announced in Dallas in a single week, $700 million for gas generators, and a 50 megawatt bet in a panhandle county most people couldn't find on a map.

So three AI deals, Three AI deals with Texas Ties landed in the span of a week, and they tell you very different things about where this build out actually stands.

So the end of October 27th, to be exact, Dallas-based Disruptive announced a $10 billion flagship fund.

Five days earlier, Crusoe lined up $700 million to buy power equipment for its AI data centers.

Then near Silverton in Briscoe County, Soluna and Applied Digital are working to close a partnership on a new AI data center there.

Now, these are separate deals and they're not one pool of money flowing through the same set of projects even.

But when you put them side-by-side, you get a pretty good map of how AI actually gets paid for.

Who's writing the checks and what the checks are actually buying, and then what still has to work out correctly before anyone starts to see a return.

The size of the bet.

Let's start with disruptive.

The Dallas firm, led by founder and CEO Alex Davis, says its new flagship fund will back roughly 10 growth and late-stage technology companies with checks of up to $1 billion each.

Yes, you heard me right, $1 billion per company.

The focus areas are technically, the focus areas, artificial intelligence, AI infrastructure, defense technology, and enterprise software.

So 10 companies, 10 billion, that's a very concentrated bet.

Instead of spreading capital across hundreds of young startups, The plan is to put serious money behind a small group of companies that are already well down the road.

And look, there's nothing wrong with that.

It's an approach that's worked for them previously.

Not to mention, there's still plenty of money flowing toward genuine early-stage startups, and it's coming from funds and M&A activity as well.

Consider the acquisition that was announced by Anthropic.

On October the 27th, the company confirmed that It bought a biotech startup that had one full-time employee, plus a handful of scientific consultants, and then 11 outside labs that they worked with.

So if you look at some broader numbers, $679 billion went to startups globally from January to September, 2026, and that's as reported by Crunchbase.

And then $102 billion went specifically to AI-related startups during Q3 alone.

Out of that quarter's $159 billion total invested.

They also called out that 27 companies raised at least $1 billion each during that same quarter.