UT Austin Nexus

Overview

UT Austin Programs and Institutions

UT Austin hosts a chip packaging foundry, the largest US academic supercomputing center, a top-10 engineering school, a growing AI research base and the Army's newest four-star command. Each has its own page, listed below.

Applied Research Laboratories at UT (ARL:UT), founded in 1945, is one of five Department of Defense (DOD) University Affiliated Research Centers. The Navy awarded it a 10-year contract worth up to $1.1 billion in 2017 for acoustics, electromagnetics and information sciences research.

Programs

Chips, Supercomputing, Engineering and AI

TIE runs the DARPA NGMM program, which stacks chips of different materials into single packages. DARPA's $840 million award and $552 million from the State of Texas total about $1.4 billion; the consortium of 32 companies and 18 academic institutions works in 84,000 square feet of cleanroom space.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) runs Frontera, Stampede3, Vista and Lonestar6, and began early operations of Horizon, its new NSF flagship, at Sabey Data Centers in Round Rock in 2026. The Cockrell School has seven departments, about 8,500 students and just under 300 tenure-track faculty; Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and winner of the 2022 ACM Turing Award, taught innovation in its electrical and computer engineering department from 2011 and is now professor emeritus.

The UT System Board of Regents approved a School of Computing on February 19, 2026, joining Computer Science, Statistics and Data Sciences, and the School of Information (iSchool). The AI base includes the Machine Learning Laboratory, the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), the Center for Generative AI and Texas Robotics.

Federal

Army and Federal Programs

T2COM was activated on October 2, 2025 at the LBJ Auditorium on the UT campus, merging Army Futures Command and the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Its Austin sites are the UT System Building headquarters, an office in Round Rock and the Army Software Factory at Austin Community College's Rio Grande Campus.

Federal programs share the same facilities: the TIE consortium also runs CHIPS Act workforce programs, TACC runs Department of Energy (DOE), DOD and NASA workloads, and Cockrell and computer science faculty advise federal programs and run sponsored projects.

Industry

Industry Partners and the Kozmetsky Legacy

Samsung's relationship with UT dates to 1996, and Emerson has contributed more than $20 million, a line that runs back to National Instruments founder Jim Truchard. Apple, Cadence, NXP and Silicon Labs co-designed the MS in Semiconductor Science and Engineering. Tesla, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, SpaceX, Apptronik and ICON recruit steadily from UT.

George Kozmetsky, who co-founded Teledyne with Henry Singleton in 1960 and was dean of UT's business school from 1966 to 1982, built the institutions these programs extend. TIE now works on the Pickle Research Campus that hosted MCC and in the original Sematech building.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

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• Austin Startup Nexus
• Austin Strategic CapEx Nexus
• The Texas Nexus
• Texas AI and Hyperscaler Data Centers
• TX Workforce Overview