Governor Abbott Announces $19.1 Million Texas Semiconductor Fund Grant to Texas Tech
A Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant of $19,108,579 is going to Texas Tech University for a next-generation computing cluster in Lubbock — a network of interconnected high-performance servers built to work as a single system on massive parallel workloads, the governor's office announced Thursday.
Texas is putting $19.1 million of semiconductor money into West Texas computing power. Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday that a Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant of $19,108,579 has been extended to Texas Tech University for its next-generation computing cluster project in Lubbock.
The project, as the governor's office describes it, will transform semiconductor research and development at the university by leveraging a network of interconnected high-performance servers designed to function as a single unified system, able to handle massive, parallel workloads. “Texas is where higher education research powers real-world innovation,” Abbott said in the announcement.
Texas Tech's leadership framed the grant as a capability jump. President Lawrence Schovanec said the support will expand the university's ability to apply advanced computing to challenges that matter to Texas, and Chancellor Brandon Creighton said NVIDIA's most advanced computing technology is coming to Texas Tech — which, he said, will give the university the fastest and most powerful computing capability at any public research university in the nation.
The grant comes out of the framework Abbott signed in 2023: the Texas CHIPS Act established the Semiconductor Innovation Fund and the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Consortium, administered by the Texas CHIPS Office inside the governor's economic development office, to keep Texas at the front of semiconductor research, design and manufacturing. Sen. Charles Perry and Rep. Carl Tepper, both West Texas lawmakers, praised the award in the announcement as a win for Lubbock and for the state's technology workforce.
