Hold onto your hats, Lubbock. Our very own Chancellor Brandon Creighton—the man who spent his legislative career heroically “saving” us from the existential threat of DEI—has found a new shiny object to distract us from the fact that we still can’t figure out how to pave 34th Street. He’s dropping $25 million of Texas Tech’s money on Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 hardware. Because nothing says “higher education” like spending a small fortune on high-end computer chips while the rest of the campus prays the AC doesn’t give out during a July heatwave.
The plan is to build an “AI Factory” right here on the main campus. According to Creighton, this “next-generation computing infrastructure” is going to revolutionize everything from agriculture to the Texas power grid. Apparently, we’re moving past the “cow and cotton” era and straight into the “Matrix” era, provided we can find a building with enough electrical outlets to plug this thing in. Creighton says this technology exceeds what many foreign governments have, which is comforting, because if there’s one thing Lubbock needs, it’s the computing power of a mid-sized nation-state to help us figure out why the wind blows so hard.
Creighton is also banking on this “AI Factory” attracting tech companies to move their families to Lubbock. He’s literally betting $25 million that Silicon Valley executives are going to see a supercomputer in the middle of a dust storm and think, “Yes, this is exactly where I want to raise my kids.” He claims this synergy will save the Texas grid billions of dollars through “modeling efficiencies.” It’s a bold strategy: since we can’t actually fix the grid with, you know, wires and maintenance, we’ll just ask a very expensive robot to “model” a world where the power doesn’t go out when it freezes.
In short, the man who told us “woke is dead” is now asking us to bow down to our new AI overlords. We might not have diversity anymore, but at least we’ll have enough processing power to generate a photorealistic image of a Lubbock sunset that doesn’t smell like feedlots.
If this AI is so smart, can it finally explain why it takes forty minutes to get through the Marsha Sharp and University intersection?
