Here were Houston's top 5 tech innovation stories of 2019

2019 in review

From a supercomputer making its debut in West Houston to a behind-the-scenes look at Amazon's artificial intelligence-enabled fulfillment center, these were Houston's top stories in tech. Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Editor's note: Houston had some big stories in technology this year, from a peek inside Amazon's artificial intelligence-enabled Houston facility and the opening of a new supercomputer to space-focused Houston startups and the future of virtual reality.

Massive data center officially opens just west of Houston

Matthew Lamont is managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions' which just opened its new, powerful data center west of Houston. Courtesy of DUG

DownUnder GeoSolutions has officially opened its new data centre in Skybox Houston in Katy, Texas. It's being billed as one of the most powerful supercomputers on earth.

The center, which houses DUG's geophysical cloud service, DUG McCloud, celebrated its grand opening on Thursday, May 16. The company's data hall has 15 megawatts of power and resides in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph.

A second, identical hall is already planned to be built out later this year. Together, the two machines will have a capacity of 650 petaflop, which is a measurement of computing speed that's equal to one thousand million million floating-point operations per second. Continue reading.

5 startups keeping Houston known as the Space City

Houston celebrated 50 years since the Apollo moon landing on July 20. Here are some startups that are going to be a part of the next 50 years of space tech in Houston. Photo via NASA.gov

This month, for the most part, has been looking back on the history Houston has as the Space City in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20. While it's great to recognize the men and women who made this city the major player in space exploration that it is, there are still entrepreneurs today with space applications and experience that represent the future of the Space City. Continue reading.

How Amazon's Houston fulfillment center uses AI technology and robotics to move millions of products

From robotics to artificial intelligence, here's how Amazon gets its products to Houstonians in record time. Photo by Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Last summer, Amazon opened the doors to its North Houston distribution center — one of the company's 50 centers worldwide that uses automation and robotics to fulfill online orders.

The Pinto Business Park facility has millions of products in inventory across four floors. Products that are 25 pounds or less (nothing heavier is stocked at this location) pass through 20 miles of conveyor belts, 1,500 employees, and hundreds of robots.

The center also has daily tours open to the public. We recently visited to see for ourselves the process a product goes through at this Houston plant. From stowing to shipping, here's how packages go from your shopping cart to your front porch. Continue reading.

Developments in virtual reality technology are changing the workforce, say Houston experts

The solution to Houston's workforce problem might be right in front of our eyes. Getty Images

Everyone's job has training associated with it — from surgeons to construction crane operators — and there's a growing market need for faster, more thorough training of our workforce.

"The best way to learn how to do something, is to just get out and do it," says Eric Liga, co-founder of HoustonVR. "But there are a lot of reasons why you can't do that in certain types of training."

Augmented and virtual reality training programs are on the rise, and Liga cites safety, cost, and unpredictable work environments as some of these most obvious reasons reasons to pivot to training employees through extended reality. This type of training also provides portability and has proven higher retention, Liga says in his keynote speech at Station Houston's AR/VR discuss on April 25.

"You get a much higher retention rate when you actually go out and do something — physically going through the motions — than you do sitting in a classroom or reading a book," he says. Continue reading.

Recently renovated Downtown Houston office space snags leases from 2 tech companies

Main&Co's office space is now 100 percent leased. Courtesy of Main&Co

Two tech-focused companies moved into a newly developed office space in downtown Houston at the intersection of Main Street and Commerce Street. One company relocated its Houston office, and the other company has expanded to the city for the first time.

Oil and gas AI-enabled analytics platform, Ruths.ai relocated its downtown office to Main&Co, located at 114 Main St. The company has 8,457 square feet of office space in the recently renovated historic building.

Meanwhile, global robotics process automation company UiPath has expanded to build a Houston team. The computer software company is based in New York, but has a presence in 18 countries. The company's office has 5,187 square feet of Main&Co's office space. Continue reading.

This week's top stories are all about big things coming to Houston, including The MKT. Courtesy of The MKT

5 most popular innovation stories in Houston this week

What's trending

This week's trending news definitely has a theme. InnovationMap readers flocked to big news stories about projects or promises not only delivering soon, but with so much more up their sleeves — five promises the mayor had for Houston, a huge mixed-use project already planning phase two, and a supercomputer named Bubba who has a twin already in the making.

Need more than just trending news on Fridays? Subscribe to our daily newsletter that sends fresh stories straight to your inboxes every morning.

Massive data center officially opens just west of Houston

Matthew Lamont is managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions' which just opened its new, powerful data center west of Houston. Courtesy of DUG

DownUnder GeoSolutions has officially opened its new data centre in Skybox Houston in Katy, Texas. It's being billed as one of the most powerful supercomputers on earth.

The center, which houses DUG's geophysical cloud service, DUG McCloud, celebrated its grand opening on Thursday, May 16. The company's data hall has 15 megawatts of power and resides in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph. Read more about DUG's new center out west.

Photos: The Cannon enters home stretch ahead of opening next month

The Cannon is expecting to open by the end of next month. Courtesy of The Cannon

If all goes according to plan, The Cannon's new space will be up and running by the end of June. The bulk of the construction, which started a little over a year ago, is done, and the team is on the home stretch. Read the story and check out renderings and progress photos.

3 Houston innovators to know this week

The three Houston innovators to know this week represent new, exciting things for the innovation ecosystem. Courtesy photos

The movers and shakers within the Houston innovation ecosystem come from all kinds of industries — from private equity to supercomputing. This week's innovators to know reflect that industry diversity and are bringing something new to the table. Meet this week's Houston innovators.

5 things Mayor Turner promised Houston in his State of the City Address

Mayor Sylvester Turner talked parks, innovation, firefighter salaries, and more at the Greater Houston Partnership's State of the City. Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

In the 2019 State of the City Address hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership on May 20, Mayor Sylvester Turner took the stage at the Marriott Marquis in front of over 1,500 Houstonians.

Some of the obvious topics were of course on the table — pension reform, hurricane recovery, job growth — but Mayor Turner surprised attendees with the announcement of a public-private parks program and again alluded to the re-envisioned of Astroworld. Here's what the mayor wants to bring to Houston.

Massive mixed-use project to bring creative office and coworking space to the Houston Heights

The MKT expects to revolutionize the live-work-play model with everything from retail and restaurant to office and coworking space. Courtesy of The MKT

On a stroll or a spin down the Heights Hike and Bike Trail, you might not notice a complete transformation is eminent. The MKT — a mixed-use renovation and build out project — is getting ready to break ground.

The five-building, 200,000-square-foot project will bring 30 retail and restaurant concepts, and 100,000 square feet of office space together along with four acres of green space, parking, and an outdoor venue alongside 1,000 linear feet of the trail between North Shepherd Drive and Herkimer Street. The MKT name comes from the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad — later known as the Katy Railroad — that was transformed into the Heights Hike and Bike Trail. Read the story and check out all the renderings.

The three Houston innovators to know this week represent new, exciting things for the innovation ecosystem. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

Who's who

The movers and shakers within the Houston innovation ecosystem come from all kinds of industries — from private equity to supercomputing. This week's innovators to know reflect that industry diversity and are bringing something new to the table.

Jon Nordby, managing director of Houston's MassChallenge Texas chapter

Jon Nordby, former exec at Houston Exponential, will lead the inaugural Houston MassChallenge cohort. Courtesy of MassChallenge

Jon Nordby, who recently served as Houston Exponential's director of strategy since its launch, was named as the managing director of MassChallenge Texas in Houston, a zero-equity startup accelerator.

"MassChallenge's not-for-profit, no equity model is uniquely suited to accelerate the development of Houston's innovation ecosystem and is the foundation early-stage startups need to get to the point of disruption or pivot as fast as possible," says Nordby in a release.

Before HX, Nordby served as vice president of talent and innovation at the Greater Houston Partnership, and was essential in creating the organization's Innovation Initiative. Click here to learn more about the appointment.

Matthew Lamont, managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions

Matthew Lamont is managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions which just opened its new, powerful data center west of Houston. Courtesy of DUG

Matthew Lamont isn't technically a Houstonian, but the managing director of Perth, Australia-based DownUnder GeoSolutions gets the honorary title for bringing one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, nicknamed Bubba, to the Houston area. In fact, perhaps Lamont accepts the recognition on behalf of Bubba, who — while inanimate — is definitely a Houstonian.

DUG is heavily investing in Houston, and Bubba is just the start. The company plans to start on a friend for Bubba later this year and bring an even more powerful supercomputer to the market by 2021. Read more about Lamont, Bubba, and all that DUG is doing in Houston here.

Taseer Badar, founder and CEO of ZT Corporate

Taseer Badar is in the business of making money. Courtesy of ZT Corporate

Taseer Badar will shoot it to you straight: Houston startups struggling to find capital might need to look nationally or globally.

"Investors in Houston want positive earnings before interest, tax, and amortization," he says. "But that doesn't mean it's not possible in New York, Dallas, Austin, or other cities. There are technology conferences everywhere, that's a great way to get known as a startup."

As CEO and founder of ZT Corporate with 1,000 investors to manage, he knows private equity, and what it takes to invest. Read more about Badar here.

Matthew Lamont is managing director at DownUnder GeoSolutions' which just opened its new, powerful data center west of Houston. Courtesy of DUG

Massive data center officially opens just west of Houston

Now online

DownUnder GeoSolutions has officially opened its new data centre in Skybox Houston in Katy, Texas. It's being billed as one of the most powerful supercomputers on earth.

The center, which houses DUG's geophysical cloud service, DUG McCloud, celebrated its grand opening on Thursday, May 16. The company's data hall has 15 megawatts of power and resides in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph.

A second, identical hall is already planned to be built out later this year. Together, the two machines will have a capacity of 650 petaflop, which is a measurement of computing speed that's equal to one thousand million million floating-point operations per second.

In addition to the second hall, DUG is working to build another giant computing system with exaflop capacity — a billion billion calculations per second — by 2021.

"We are in a race to build the first exascale supercomputing system," says Phil Schwan, CTO for DUG, in a news release.

Australia-based DUG first started construction on Bubba, the nickname for the machine, last year and chose Skybox Datacenters as the facility to put Bubba in after a global search. The supercomputer landing in Houston represented the largest data center transaction in the Houston area's history. Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio have long overshadowed Houston as hotspots for data center activity in Texas.

An differentiating asset of Bubba is the cooling process, which reduces energy usage and costs. Thirteen miles of pipes connect the hard drives to 20-foot cooling towers. Bubba uses "its own patented immersion system that submerges the computer nodes in more than 700 specially-designed tanks filled with polyalphaolefin dielectric fluid," according to the release.

"The complete DUG Insight software suite is available, and is fully-optimised to run on the cloud," says DUG's managing director, Matthew Lamont.

DUG's device is based on Intel® Xeon® processors, and the company uses Intel's technology to enhance its services, and there are more than 40,000 Intel Xeon processor nodes within the DUG McCloud network.

"The close collaboration between our two companies ensures DUG customers have access to the compute resources needed to obtain more meaningful insights from the geophysical landscapes they are exploring," says Trish Damkroger, vice president and general manager of Intel's Extreme Computing Organization, in a release.

"The Bubba supercomputer is a tremendous addition to the DUG McCloud network, and we look forward to our continued collaboration to build even more powerful systems to help accelerate this research and development."

Super-sized supercomputer

Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Bubba, as the machine is called, has 15 megawatts of power and resides in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph.

DownUnder GeoSolutions, which has its U.S. headquarters in Houston, is getting ready to flip the switch on what is being billed as the world's fastest supercomputer. Photo via DUG.com

World's fastest supercomputer is getting ready to power on in Houston

Booting up

An Australian company that provides geoscience and tech services to the oil and gas industry is gearing up to flip the switch in Katy on what's being billed as the world's fastest supercomputer.

At the 20-acre Skybox Houston data center campus in the Energy Corridor, DownUnder GeoSolutions is assembling a 15-megawatt data center that will house more than 40,000 servers to create the world's fastest supercomputer. Houston is the U.S. headquarters for DUG.

The data center will power a cloud computing service, known as DUG McCloud, that's tailored to the geosciences sector. The company says DUG McCloud will supply "enormous" computing capacity and high-performance storage for DUG's cloud business.

Construction on DUG McCloud — which has been delayed due to recent heavy rains — is set to be completed in April, according to the company's blog.

"DUG McCloud will be available to external companies to expand their computational resources on demand," the company says on its blog. "In addition, the cloud service will give clients access to DUG's proprietary software, with the option of source code, to accelerate their research, development, and production."

DUG McCloud is being touted as the world's biggest cloud computing service for the oil and gas industry. Among its prospective clients are global oil companies, government-owned oil producers, seismic contractors, and data companies.

"DUG McCloud is offering a wide range of companies the opportunity to significantly accelerate their oil and gas projects with cutting-edge geophysical software, stacked with extraordinary supercomputer power and services," Mick Lambert, the newly hired manager of DUG McCloud, said in December.

So, just how extraordinary will DUG's new supercomputer be?

DUG's equipment — contained in a building designed to withstand hurricane-force winds up to 190 mph — will offer more than 250 single-precision petaflops of computing speed, or 250,000 trillion calculations per second.

For now, the world's fastest supercomputer is Summit, a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM. Its top speed is 200 petaflops. Summit operates at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Over the long term, DUG envisions its data center being able to handle exascale computing, capable of generating at least 1 quintillion calculations per second. A quintillion has twice as many zeroes as a billion does. China is set to debut the world's first exascale supercomputer in 2020 — a year ahead of the first one to be established in the U.S., a $500 million public-private project called Aurora being developed by the Department of Energy and Intel.

DUG's deal for its data center in Katy represents the largest data center transaction in the Houston area's history. Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio have long overshadowed Houston as hotspots for data center activity in Texas.

Matthew Lamont, co-founder of DUG, said in October that the company conducted an "exhaustive" search for the data center. "Houston was a natural choice," he said, "given the low cost of power and the fact that Skybox had the available infrastructure ready to go."

A unique feature of DUG's data center is how the servers will be cooled. The company's patent-pending DUG Cool system will immerse all of the servers in custom-designed tanks filled with an environmentally friendly cooling fluid.

DUG says this fluid enables condensed water-cooling chillers to be used to cool the servers, rather than server fans and refrigeration units. This will reduce energy consumption by 45 percent compared with traditional air-cooled systems, according to DUG.

"We like to call it the greenest cloud service in the world," Lamont said on DUG's blog. "DUG McCloud certainly offers more than just a silver lining."

The DUG center represents about 65 percent of the 23 megawatts of data center space under construction in the Houston area, according to a new report from commercial real estate services company CBRE.

"As high-performance computing continues to grow in importance to the energy sector, it is likely that additional latency-sensitive deployments will grow in the Houston market," Haynes Strader, senior associate at CBRE, says in a news release.

"Latency-sensitive" refers to the need for technology to act quickly in response to various events.

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Houston medtech startup clears FDA approval for new surgical tool

precision surgery

Houston-based Prana Surgical will soon bring a new electrosurgical tool to operating rooms around the country. The Prana System officially cleared U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval earlier this month.

"Receiving FDA clearance for the Prana System represents a defining milestone for our company," Joanna Nathan, CEO and co-founder of Prana Surgical, said in a news release. "Surgeons today are increasingly focused on achieving precise outcomes while minimizing disruption to healthy tissue. The Prana System was designed to support that shift by integrating targeting and excision into a single, streamlined tool."

Prana Surgical began as Prana Thoracic in 2022. Back then, the company primarily focused on developing screening tools for lung cancer diagnosis. It raised $6 million in series A funding rounds in 2023 and 2024 before transitioning to broader surgical needs in 2025.

The Prana System is a minimally invasive, image-guided, single-use tissue extraction tool designed to retrieve samples without damaging healthy tissue. The tool is still designed with the respiratory system in mind, helping Prana in the fight against lung cancer and other thoracic diseases.

Reducing the impact of tissue extraction via electrosurgery and enhanced image scanning can significantly reduce complications. The Prana System combines localization and tissue-cutting capabilities in one, which keeps surgeons from having to swap out components during a procedure, making for a smoother process. It can core, cut and feel blood vessels on the way toward the intended target, giving surgeons greater control over tissue preservation.

"Electrosurgery is foundational to modern surgery, but there is still opportunity to improve how energy-based tools are applied in minimally invasive settings," Nathan added. "Our goal is to introduce a new class of image-guided surgical tools that enable more precise intervention across a range of procedures."

The company projects sales of $7.5 billion from the Prana System in the United States, estimating that 2.5 million surgical modules will be able to use the new tool. While starting out focused on biopsies, the company plans to evolve the system into other procedures, such as ablation, in the future. It is also planning for a controlled U.S. clinical rollout as it moves toward commercialization

Texas still ranks as No. 1 in U.S. for inbound moves, but growth dips

by the numbers

Texas continues to be the country’s No. 1 magnet for newcomers from other states, giving a boost to the state’s economy. However, Texas’ appeal weakened in 2024 compared with the previous year, due in large part to spiking home prices.

An analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by self-storage platform StorageCafe shows Texas saw net interstate migration of 76,000 people in 2024. Texas’ net interstate migration dropped nearly 50 percent from 2023, according to the analysis. Net migration refers to the number of incoming residents minus the number of outgoing residents.

California remained the top source of newcomers for Texas, sending nearly 77,000 residents to the Lone Star State in 2024, the analysis says. Florida ranked second, followed by New York, Colorado and Illinois.

“These trends reveal Texas’ continued pull from both high-cost coastal markets and other large Sun Belt states, resulting in a mix of affordability-driven and job-driven relocation,” StorageCafe says.

Putting a damper on the influx of new residents: a roughly 124 percent surge in Texas home prices over the past decade, according to StorageCafe.

“While the state remains significantly more affordable than California, its top feeder state, the once-wide pricing gap has narrowed,” says StorageCafe. “For many movers, Texas is still a relative bargain, but no longer an undisputed one.”

Nonetheless, Texas keeps attracting young, highly educated people, which bodes well for the state’s long-term economic outlook, StorageCafe says. More than half of new arrivals to Texas in 2024 held at least a bachelor’s degree, and the age of newcomers averaged 32.

Where are most of these young, highly educated newcomers settling?

Lloyd Potter, former Texas state demographer, tells StorageCafe that population growth in Texas is happening most rapidly in suburban “ring counties” at the expense of slowing growth in urban cores. Ring counties are on the outskirts of major metro areas.

“Many people are moving from urban cores to suburban rings seeking lower costs, newer housing, better schools, and more space,” Potter says. “Typically, a move to a suburban county will be within commuting or hybrid‑commuting distance of major metro economies.”

Artemis II makes historic call to space station with help from Houston Mission Control

History in the making

Still aglow from their triumphant lunar flyby, the Artemis II astronauts made more history Tuesday, April 7: calling their friends aboard the International Space Station hundreds of thousands of miles away as they headed home from the moon.

It was the first moonship-to-spaceship radio linkup ever. NASA's Apollo crews had no off-the-planet company back in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time humanity set sail for deep space.

"We have been waiting for this like you can’t imagine,” Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman called out.

For Christina Koch on Artemis II and Jessica Meir aboard the space station, it marked a joyous space reunion despite being 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) apart. The two teamed up for the world's first all-female spacewalk in 2019 outside the orbiting lab.

Koch told her “astro-sister” that she'd hoped to meet up with her again in space “but I never thought it would be like this — it's amazing.”

“I'm so happy that we are back in space together,” Meir replied, “even if we are a few miles apart.”

Houston's Mission Control arranged the cosmic chitchat between the four lunar travelers and the space station's three NASA and one French residents.

Koch described being awe-struck by not just the beauty of Earth, “but how much blackness there was around it.”

“It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she told the space station crew. “The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized” when viewing the home planet from the moon.

By late Tuesday afternoon, the Artemis II astronauts had beamed back more than 50 gigabytes' worth of pictures and other data from the previous day's lunar rendezvous, which set a new distance record for humanity. The highlight: an Earthset photo reminiscent of Apollo 8's Earthrise shot from 1968.

"While they are inspirational and, I think, allow all of us to really feel a little bit of what they were feeling, there's also a lot of science hidden inside of those images," said Mission Control's lead lunar scientist Kelsey Young. “The conversations and the science lessons learned are just beginning."

During a debriefing with Young, the astronauts recounted how they spotted a cascade of pinpricks of light on the lunar surface from impacting cosmic debris. The flashes lasted mere milliseconds and coincided by chance with Monday evening's total solar eclipse.

Young said it was too soon to know whether the crew witnessed an actual meteor shower or more random, run-of-the-mill micrometeoroid hits. Either way, there were “audible screams of delight” in the science operations center, she said.

Koch described being awe-struck by not just the beauty of Earth, “but how much blackness there was around it.”

“It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she told the space station crew. “The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized” when viewing the home planet from the moon.

The first lunar explorers since Apollo 17 in 1972, Wiseman and his crew are aiming for a splashdown off the San Diego coast on Friday to wrap up the nearly 10-day test flight. The recovery ship USS John P. Murtha left port Tuesday for the target zone.

It sets the stage for next year's Artemis III, a lunar lander docking demo in orbit around Earth. Artemis IV will follow in 2028 with two astronauts attempting to land near the lunar south pole.

As for the Orion capsule’s pesky potty, Mission Control assured the astronauts that no maintenance was required Tuesday. The toilet has been on-and-off limits to the crew ever since last week’s launch, prompting them to rely on a backup bag-and-funnel system for urinating.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the crew following the lunar flyby Monday night: “We definitely have to fix some of the plumbing” ahead of the next Artemis mission. Engineers suspect a clogged filter in the overboard flushing system.

Aside from the toilet and other relatively minor matters, the mission has gone well, Isaacman noted at a news conference Tuesday, “but I'll breathe easier when we get through reentry and everybody's under chutes and in the water.”

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