Your data center is either closer than you think or much farther away

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A map of U.S. data centers. Courtesy of Rice Businesses Wisdom

A new study shows why some facilities cluster in cities for speed and access, while others move to rural regions in search of scale and lower costs. Based on research by Tommy Pan Fang (Rice Business) and Shane Greenstein (Harvard).

Key findings:

  • Third-party colocation centers are physical facilities in close proximity to firms that use them, while cloud providers operate large data centers from a distance and sell access to virtualized computing resources as on‑demand services over the internet.
  • Hospitals and financial firms often require urban third-party centers for low latency and regulatory compliance, while batch processing and many AI workloads can operate more efficiently from lower-cost cloud hubs.
  • For policymakers trying to attract data centers, access to reliable power, water and high-capacity internet matter more than tax incentives.

Recent outages and the surge in AI-driven computing have made data center siting decisions more consequential than ever, especially as energy and water constraints tighten. Communities invest public dollars on the promise of jobs and growth, while firms weigh long-term commitments to land, power and connectivity.

Against that backdrop, a critical question comes into focus: Where do data centers get built — and what actually drives those decisions?

A new study by Tommy Pan Fang (Rice Business) and Shane Greenstein (Harvard Business School) provides the first large-scale statistical analysis of data center location strategies across the United States. It offers policymakers and firms a clearer starting point for understanding how different types of data centers respond to economic and strategic incentives.

Forthcoming in the journal Strategy Science, the study examines two major types of infrastructure: third-party colocation centers that lease server space to multiple firms, and hyperscale cloud centers owned by providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Two Models, Two Location Strategies

The study draws on pre-pandemic data from 2018 and 2019, a period of relative geographic stability in supply and demand. This window gives researchers a clean baseline before remote work, AI demand and new infrastructure pressures began reshaping internet traffic patterns.

The findings show that data centers follow a bifurcated geography. Third-party centers cluster in dense urban markets, where buyers prioritize proximity to customers despite higher land and operating costs. Cloud providers, by contrast, concentrate massive sites in a small number of lower-density regions, where electricity, land and construction are cheaper and economies of scale are easier to achieve.

Third-party data centers, in other words, follow demand. They locate in urban markets where firms in finance, healthcare and IT value low latency, secure storage, and compliance with regulatory standards.

Using county-level data, the researchers modeled how population density, industry mix and operating costs predict where new centers enter. Every U.S. metro with more than 700,000 residents had at least one third-party provider, while many mid-sized cities had none.

ImageThis pattern challenges common assumptions. Third-party facilities are more distributed across urban America than prevailing narratives suggest.

Customer proximity matters because some sectors cannot absorb delay. In critical operations, even slight pauses can have real consequences. For hospital systems, lag can affect performance and risk exposure. And in high-frequency trading, milliseconds can determine whether value is captured or lost in a transaction.

“For industries where speed is everything, being too far from the physical infrastructure can meaningfully affect performance and risk,” Pan Fang says. “Proximity isn’t optional for sectors that can’t absorb delay.”

The Economics of Distance

For cloud providers, the picture looks very different. Their decisions follow a logic shaped primarily by cost and scale. Because cloud services can be delivered from afar, firms tend to build enormous sites in low-density regions where power is cheap and land is abundant.

These facilities can draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity and operate with far fewer employees than urban centers. “The cloud can serve almost anywhere,” Pan Fang says, “so location is a question of cost before geography.”

The study finds that cloud infrastructure clusters around network backbones and energy economics, not talent pools. Well-known hubs like Ashburn, Virginia — often called “Data Center Alley” — reflect this logic, having benefited from early network infrastructure that made them natural convergence points for digital traffic.

Local governments often try to lure data centers with tax incentives, betting they will create high-tech jobs. But the study suggests other factors matter more to cloud providers, including construction costs, network connectivity and access to reliable, affordable electricity.

When cloud centers need a local presence, distance can sometimes become a constraint. Providers often address this by working alongside third-party operators. “Third-party centers can complement cloud firms when they need a foothold closer to customers,” Pan Fang says.

That hybrid pattern — massive regional hubs complementing strategic colocation — may define the next phase of data center growth.

Looking ahead, shifts in remote work, climate resilience, energy prices and AI-driven computing may reshape where new facilities go. Some workloads may move closer to users, while others may consolidate into large rural hubs. Emerging data-sovereignty rules could also redirect investment beyond the United States.

“The cloud feels weightless,” Pan Fang says, “but it rests on real choices about land, power and proximity.”

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom. Written by Scott Pett.

Pan Fang and Greenstein (2025). “Where the Cloud Rests: The Economic Geography of Data Centers,” forthcoming in Strategy Science.

Search trends predict future retail revenue up to three quarters in advance. Photo via Pexels

Forecasting retail sales just got smarter, thanks to Google searches

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Imagine being able to predict the future of retail sales — not with months-old economic reports, but with real-time digital breadcrumbs left behind by consumers. Thanks to new research from K. Ramesh (Rice Business) and Gary Lind (University of Pittsburgh), that future is already here.

Key findings

  • Search trends predict future retail revenue — up to three quarters ahead.
  • Markets don’t fully price in search-based insights, especially before earnings announcements.
  • Trading strategies using search data outperform traditional asset-pricing models by 2–3%.
  • Analysts often underuse this data, resulting in predictable forecast errors.
  • At the macro level, search trends closely track — and often lead — official retail sales and GDP.

Their study shows that Google search trends are powerful predictors of consumer demand, capable of forecasting U.S. retail sales up to three quarters in advance. The implications span industries and audiences — from Wall Street traders to Main Street retailers, and from data-driven CFOs to curious business students.

A smarter, faster crystal ball for retail demand

Retail sales drive nearly 70% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), making them one of the most important indicators of economic health. Yet traditional forecasting relies heavily on backward-looking data and broad economic indicators. Ramesh and Lind’s work offers a leap forward: search data from Google Trends — publicly available and easy to use — can offer a faster, more precise signal of where sales are headed.

“If you want to understand consumer demand,” says Ramesh, the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Rice Business, “look at what people are searching for — not just what companies report after the fact. These digital footprints can tell us where revenue is going, often before the market catches up.”

This low-cost approach stands in stark contrast to expensive alternatives, such as satellite images of parking lots, in-store foot traffic from mobile data, or retail scanner feeds — tools often reserved for hedge funds and large institutional investors. Google Trends offers a scalable, accessible option for anyone seeking insight into consumer behavior.

Why this matters for investors and analysts

The researchers analyzed search patterns for nearly 200 publicly traded U.S. retail companies between 2004 and 2019. They found that firms with rising search volumes tend to report higher revenues — often well before analysts or investors react.

In fact, investment strategies built around these trends earned 2–3% higher returns than traditional models would predict. And most of these gains were concentrated around earnings announcements — a sign that markets were slow to recognize what search data had already revealed.

The advantage is even more striking for companies that fly under Wall Street’s radar. For firms with limited analyst coverage, the predictive power of search data on stock performance was more than 80% stronger.

A new tool for analysts — if they’ll use it

Despite the clear signal in the data, the study finds that analysts routinely fail to incorporate search-based insights into their forecasts. That gap translates into missed revenue predictions and market inefficiencies — which sophisticated investors can exploit.

“The search data are out there,” says Lind, a Rice Business Ph.D. ’19 graduate now on faculty at Pitt Business. “They’re public, powerful, and free. Analysts who ignore them are missing an opportunity.”

The impact of this research extends well beyond equity markets. By aggregating Google search data across the retail sector, the authors found strong alignment with U.S. Census retail sales figures and GDP trends. In other words, these digital signals reflect not just firm-level interest, but macroeconomic momentum.

A data wake-up call

This makes search trends a potentially valuable early-warning system for policymakers, central banks, and anyone responsible for interpreting the economic landscape. During volatile or uncertain periods, such tools could offer precious foresight into shifting consumer behavior.

In a digital era where consumers research before they shop — whether online or in-store — it’s no surprise that their Google queries leave valuable clues. What’s surprising is how often businesses, investors, and even economists still overlook them, Ramesh says. “Search data is a goldmine. And it's just sitting there, waiting to be used.”

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom.

Lind and Ramesh, “Using Internet Search Data to Predict Aggregate Retail Sales and Enhance Firm-Level Revenue Expectations,” Contemporary Accounting Research (April 2025): 1-32. https://doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.13043.

Nurturing what is known as “promotion focus” can help managers spot fresh ideas.
Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

Houston researchers: Here's what it takes to spot a great new idea

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Having a “promotion focus” really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Key findings:

  • New ideas can be crucially important to businesses, driving innovation and preventing stagnation.
  • Recognizing those ideas, though, isn’t always easy.
  • Nurturing what is known as “promotion focus” can help managers spot fresh ideas.

Whenever the late surgeon Michael DeBakey opened a human chest, he drew on a lifetime of resources: the conviction that heart surgery could and should be vastly improved, the skill to venture beyond medicine’s known horizons and the vision to recognize new ideas in everyone around him, no matter how little formal training they had.

Appreciating new ideas is the heartbeat of business as well as medicine. But innovation is surprisingly hard to recognize. In a pioneering 2017 article, Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou and her colleagues published their findings on the first-ever study of the traits and environments that allow leaders to recognize new ideas.

Recent decades have produced a surge of research looking at how and when employees generate fresh ideas. But almost nothing has been written on another crucial part of workplace creativity: a leader’s ability to appreciate new thinking when she sees it.

Novelty, after all, is what drives company differentiation and competitiveness. Work that springs from new concepts sparks more investigation than work based on worn, already established thought. Companies invest millions to recruit and pay star creatives.

Yet not every leader can spot a fresh idea, and not every workplace brings out that kind of discernment. In four separate studies, Zhou and her coauthors examined exactly what it takes to see a glittering new idea wherever it appears. Their work sets the stage for an entirely new field of future research.

First, though, the team had to define their key terms. “Novelty recognition” is the ability to spot a new idea when someone else presents it. “Promotion focus,” previous research has shown, is a comfort level with new experiences that evokes feelings of adventure and excitement. “Prevention focus” is the opposite trait: the tendency to associate new ideas with danger, and respond to them with caution.

But does having “promotion focus” as opposed to “prevention focus” color the ability to see novelty? To find out, Zhou’s team came up with an ingenious test, artificially inducing these two perspectives through a series of exercises. First, they told 92 undergraduate participants that they would be asked to perform a set of unrelated tasks. Then the subjects guided a fictional mouse through two pencil and paper maze exercises.

While one exercise showed a piece of cheese awaiting the mouse at the end of the maze (the promise of a reward), the other maze depicted a menacing owl nearby (motivation to flee).

Once the participants had traced their way through the mazes with pencils, they were asked to rate the novelty of 33 pictures — nine drawings of space aliens and 24 unrelated images. The students who were prepped to feel an adventurous promotion focus by seeking a reward were much better at spotting the new or different details among these images than the students who’d been cued to have a prevention focus by fleeing a threat.

The conclusion: a promotion focus really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Zhou’s team followed this study with three additional studies, including one that surveyed 44 human resource managers from a variety of companies. For this study, independent coders rated the mission statements of each firm, assessing their cultures as “innovative” or “not innovative.” The HR managers then evaluated a set of written practices — three that had been in use for years, and three new ones that relied on recent technology. The managers from the innovative companies were much better at rating the new HR practices for novelty and creativity. To recognize novelty, in other words, both interior and external environments make a difference.

The implications of the research are groundbreaking. The first ever done on this subject, it opens up a completely new research field with profound questions. Can promotion focus be created? How much of this trait is genetic, and how much based on natural temperament, culture, environment and life experience? Should promotion focus be cultivated in education? If so, what would be the impact? After all, there are important uses for prevention focus, such as corporate security and compliance. Meanwhile, how can workplaces be organized to bring out the best in both kinds of focus?

Leaders eager to put Zhou’s findings to use right away, meanwhile, might look to the real-world model of Michael DeBakey. Practice viewing new ideas as adventures, seek workplaces that actively push innovation and, above all, cultivate the view that every coworker, high or low, is a potential source of glittering new ideas.

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom.

Jing Zhou is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology in Organizational Behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business of Rice University. Zhou, J., Wang, X., Song, J., & Wu, J. (2017). "Is it new? Personal and contextual influences on perceptions of novelty and creativity." Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(2): 180-202.

ChatGPT enhances creativity and problem-solving in ways that traditional search tools can’t match. Photo courtesy of Rice Business Wisdom

Houston researchers find AI provides fresh perspectives to everyday problems

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We all know ChatGPT has forever changed how we do business. It’s modified how we access information, compose content and analyze data. It’s revolutionized the future of work and education. And it has transformed the way we interact with technology.

Now, thanks to a recent paper by Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung (Rice Business), we also know it’s making us better problem solvers.

Key findings:

  • A recent study finds ChatGPT-generated ideas are deemed an average of 15% more creative than traditional methods.
  • ChatGPT enhances “incremental,” but not “radical,” innovation.
  • ChatGPT boosts creativity in tasks normally associated with human traits, like empathy-based challenges.

According to the study published in Nature Human Behavior by Chung and Byung Cheol Lee (University of Houston), ChatGPT enhances our problem-solving abilities, especially with everyday challenges. Whether coming up with gifts for your teenage niece or pondering what to do with an old tennis racquet, ChatGPT has a unique ability to generate creative ideas.

“Creative problem-solving often requires connecting different concepts in a cohesive way,” Chung says. “ChatGPT excels at this because it pulls from a vast range of data, enabling it to generate new combinations of ideas.”

Can ChatGPT Really Make Us More Creative?

Chung and Lee sought to answer a central question: Can ChatGPT help people think more creatively than traditional search engines? To answer this, they conducted five experiments.

Each experiment asked participants to generate ideas for solving challenges, such as how to repurpose household items. Depending on the experiment, participants were divided into one of two or three groups: one that used ChatGPT; one that used conventional web search tools (e.g., Google); and one that used no external tool at all. The resulting ideas were evaluated by both laypeople and business experts based on two critical aspects of creativity: originality and appropriateness (i.e., practicality).

In one standout experiment, participants were asked to come up with an idea for a dining table that doesn’t exist on the market. The ChatGPT group came up with suggestions like a “rotating table,” a “floating table” and even “a table that adjusts its height based on the dining experience.” According to both judges and experts, the ChatGPT group consistently delivered the most creative solutions.

On average, across all experiments, ideas generated with ChatGPT were rated 15% more creative than those produced by traditional methods. This was true even when tasks were specifically designed to require empathy or involved multiple constraints — tasks we typically assume humans might be better at performing.

However, Chung and Lee also found a caveat: While ChatGPT excels at generating ideas that are “incrementally” new — i.e., building on existing concepts — it struggles to produce “radically” new ideas that break from established patterns. “ChatGPT is an incredible tool for tweaking and improving existing ideas, but when it comes to disruptive innovation, humans still hold the upper hand,” Chung notes.

Charting the Next Steps in AI and Creativity

Chung and Lee’s paper opens the door to many exciting avenues for future study. For example, researchers could explore whether ChatGPT’s creative abilities extend to more complex, high-stakes problem-solving environments. Could AI be harnessed to develop groundbreaking solutions in fields like medicine, engineering or social policy? Understanding the nuances of the collaboration between humans and AI could shape the future of education, work and even (as many people fear) art.

For professionals in creative fields like product design or marketing, the study holds especially significant implications. The ability to rapidly generate fresh ideas can be a game-changer in industries where staying ahead of trends is vital. For now, take a second before you throw out that old tennis racquet. Ask ChatGPT for inspiration — you’ll be surprised at how many ideas it comes up with, and how quickly.

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom. Based on research by Jaeyeon (Jae) Chung and Byung Cheol Lee (University of Houston). Lee and Chung, “An empirical investigation of the impact of ChatGPT on creativity.” Nature Human Behavior (2024): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01953-1.


Grocery purchase data can accurately predict credit risk for individuals without traditional credit scores, potentially broadening the pool of qualified loan applicants. Photo via Unsplash

Houston researchers find alternate data for loan qualification

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Millions of consumers who apply for a loan to buy a house or car or start a business can’t qualify — even if they’re likely to pay it back. That’s because many lack a key piece of financial information: a credit score.

The problem isn’t just isolated to emerging economies. Exclusion from the financial system is a major issue in the United States, too, where some 45 million adults may be denied access to loans because they don’t have a credit history and are “credit invisible.”

To improve access to loans and peoples’ economic mobility, lenders have started looking into alternative data sources to assess a loan applicant’s risk of defaulting. These include bank account transactions and on-time rental, utility and mobile phone payments.

A new article by Rice Business assistant professor of marketing Jung Youn Lee and colleagues from Notre Dame and Northwestern identifies an even more widespread data source that could broaden the pool of qualified applicants: grocery store receipts.

As metrics for predicting credit risk, the researchers found that the types of food, drinks and other products consumers buy, and how they buy them, are just as good as a traditional credit score.

“There could be privacy concerns when you think about it in practice,” Lee says, “so the consumer should really have the option and be empowered to do it.” One approach could be to let consumers opt in to a lender looking at their grocery data as a second chance at approval rather than automatically enrolling them and offering an opt-out.

To arrive at their findings, the researchers analyzed grocery transaction data from a multinational conglomerate headquartered in a Middle Eastern country that owns a credit card issuer and a large-scale supermarket chain. Many people in the country are unbanked. They merged the supermarket’s loyalty card data and issuer’s credit card spending and payment history numbers, resulting in data on 30,089 consumers from January 2017 to June 2019. About half had a credit score, 81% always paid their credit card bills on time, 12% missed payments periodically, and 7% defaulted.

The researchers first created a model to establish a connection between grocery purchasing behavior and credit risk. They found that people who bought healthy foods like fresh milk, yogurt and fruits and vegetables were more likely to pay their bills on time, while shoppers who purchased cigarettes, energy drinks and canned meat tended to miss payments. This held true for “observationally equivalent” individuals — those with similar income, occupation, employment status and number of dependents. In other words, when two people look demographically identical, the study still finds that they have different credit risks.

People’s grocery-buying behaviors play a factor in their likelihood to pay their bills on time, too. For example, cardholders who consistently paid their credit card bill on time were more likely to shop on the same day of the week, spend similar amounts across months and buy the same brands and product categories.

The researchers then built two credit-scoring predictive algorithms to simulate a lender’s decision of whether or not to approve a credit card applicant. One excludes grocery data inputs, and the other includes them (in addition to standard data). Incorporating grocery data into their decision-making process improved risk assessment of an applicant by a factor of 3.11% to 7.66%.

Furthermore, the lender in the simulation experienced a 1.46% profit increase when the researchers implemented a two-stage decision-making process — first, screening applicants using only standard data, then adding grocery data as an additional layer.

One caveat to these findings, Lee and her colleagues warn, is that the benefit of grocery data falls sharply as traditional credit scores or relationship-specific credit histories become available. This suggests the data could be most helpful for consumers new to credit.

Overall, however, this could be a win-win scenario for both consumers and lenders. “People excluded from the traditional credit system gain access to loans,” Lee says, “and lenders become more profitable by approving more creditworthy people.”

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom based on research by Rice University's Jung Youn Lee, Joonhyuk Yang (Notre Dame) and Eric Anderson (Northwestern). “Using Grocery Data for Credit Decisions.” Forthcoming in Management Science. 2024: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02364.


Using biased statistics in hiring makes it more difficult to predict job performance. Photo via Getty Images

Houston research finds race, gender ineffective predictors of employee productivity

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The Latin phrase scientia potentia est translates to “knowledge is power.”

In the world of business, there’s a school of thought that takes “knowledge is power” to an extreme. It’s called statistical discrimination theory. This framework suggests that companies should use all available information to make decisions and maximize profits, including the group characteristics of potential hires — such as race and gender — that correlate with (but do not cause) productivity.

Statistical discrimination theory suggests that if there's a choice between equally qualified candidates — let's say, a man and a woman — the hiring manager should use gender-based statistics to the company's benefit. If there's data showing that male employees typically have larger networks and more access to professional development opportunities, the hiring manager should select the male candidate, believing such information points to a more productive employee.

Recent research suggests otherwise.

A peer-reviewed study out of Rice Business and Michigan Ross undercuts the premise of statistical discrimination theory. According to researchers Diana Jue-Rajasingh (Rice Business), Felipe A. Csaszar (Michigan) and Michael Jensen (Michigan), hiring outcomes actually improve when decision-makers ignore statistics that correlate employee productivity with characteristics like race and gender.

Here's Why “Less is More”

Statistical discrimination theory assumes a correlation between individual productivity and group characteristics (e.g., race and gender). But Jue-Rajasingh and her colleagues highlight three factors that undercut that assumption:

  • Environmental uncertainty
  • Biased interpretations of productivity
  • Decision-maker inconsistency

This third factor plays the biggest role in the researchers' model. “For statistical discrimination theory to work,” Jue-Rajasingh says, “it must assume that managers are infallible and decision-making conditions are optimal.”

Indeed, when accounting for uncertainty, inconsistency and interpretive bias, the researchers found that using information about group characteristics actually reduces the accuracy of job performance predictions.

That’s because the more information you include in the decision-making process, the more complex that process becomes. Complex processes make it more difficult to navigate uncertain environments and create more space for managers to make mistakes. It seems counterintuitive, but when firms use less information and keep their processes simple, they are more accurate in predicting the productivity of their hires.

The less-is-more strategy is known as a “heuristic.” Heuristics are simple, efficient rules or mental shortcuts that help decision-makers navigate complex environments and make judgments more quickly and with less information. In the context of this study, published by Organization Science, the heuristic approach suggests that by focusing on fewer, more relevant cues, managers can make better hiring decisions.

Two Types of Information "Cues"

The “less is more” heuristic works better than statistical discrimination theory largely because decision makers are inconsistent in how they weight the available information. To factor for inconsistency, Jue-Rajasingh and her colleagues created a model that reflects the “noise” of external factors, such as a decision maker’s mood or the ambiguity of certain information.

The model breaks the decision-making process into two main components: the environment and the decision maker.

In the environment component, there are two types of information, or “cues,” about job candidates. First, there’s the unobservable, causal cue (e.g., programming ability), which directly relates to job performance. Second, there's the observable, discriminatory cue (e.g., race or gender), which doesn't affect how well someone can do the job but, because of how society has historically worked, might statistically seem connected to job skills.

Even if the decision maker knows they shouldn't rely too much on information like race or gender, they might still use it to predict productivity. But job descriptions change, contexts are unstable, and people don’t consistently consider all variables. Between the inconsistency of decision-makers and the environmental noise created by discriminatory cues, it’s ultimately counterproductive to consider this information.

The Bottom Line

Jue-Rajasingh and her colleagues find that avoiding gender- and race-based statistics improves the accuracy of job performance predictions. The fewer discriminatory cues decision-makers rely on, the less likely their process will lead to errors.

That said: With the advent of AI, it could become easier to justify statistical discrimination theory. The element of human inconsistency would be removed from the equation. But because AI is often rooted in biased data, its use in hiring must be carefully examined to prevent worsening inequity.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom based on research by Rice University's Diana Jue-Rajasingh, Felipe A. Csaszar (Michigan) and Michael Jensen (Michigan). For more, see Csaszar, et al. “When Less is More: How Statistical Discrimination Can Decrease Predictive Accuracy.”

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Axiom Space wins NASA contract for fifth private mission to ISS

ready for takeoff

Axiom Space, a Houston-based space infrastructure company that’s developing the first commercial space station, has forged a deal with NASA to carry out the fifth civilian-staffed mission to the International Space Station.

Axiom Mission 5 is scheduled to launch in January 2027, at the earliest, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew of non-government astronauts is expected to spend up to 14 days docked at the International Space Station (ISS). Various science and research activities will take place during the mission.

The crew for the upcoming mission hasn’t been announced. Previous Axiom missions were commanded by retired NASA astronauts Michael López-Alegría, the company’s chief astronaut, and Peggy Whitson, the company’s vice president of human spaceflight.

“All four previous [Axiom] missions have expanded the global community of space explorers, diversifying scientific investigations in microgravity, and providing significant insight that is benefiting the development of our next-generation space station, Axiom Station,” Jonathan Cirtain, president and CEO of Axiom, said in a news release.

As part of Axiom’s new contract with NASA, Voyager Technologies will provide payload services for Axiom’s fifth mission. Voyager, a defense, national security, and space technology company, recently announced a four-year, $24.5 million contract with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to provide mission management services for the ISS.

Houston edtech company closes oversubscribed $3M seed round

fresh funding

Houston-based edtech company TrueLeap Inc. closed an oversubscribed seed round last month.

The $3.3 million round was led by Joe Swinbank Family Limited Partnership, a venture capital firm based in Houston. Gamper Ventures, another Houston firm, also participated with additional strategic partners.

TrueLeap reports that the funding will support the large-scale rollout of its "edge AI, integrated learning systems and last-mile broadband across underserved communities."

“The last mile is where most digital transformation efforts break down,” Sandip Bordoloi, CEO and president of TrueLeap, said in a news release. “TrueLeap was built to operate where bandwidth is limited, power is unreliable, and institutions need real systems—not pilots. This round allows us to scale infrastructure that actually works on the ground.”

True Leap works to address the digital divide in education through its AI-powered education, workforce systems and digital services that are designed for underserved and low-connectivity communities.

The company has created infrastructure in Africa, India and rural America. Just this week, it announced an agreement with the City of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo to deploy a digital twin platform for its public education system that will allow provincial leaders to manage enrollment, staffing, infrastructure and performance with live data.

“What sets TrueLeap apart is their infrastructure mindset,” Joe Swinbank, General Partner at Joe Swinbank Family Limited Partnership, added in the news release. “They are building the physical and digital rails that allow entire ecosystems to function. The convergence of edge compute, connectivity, and services makes this a compelling global infrastructure opportunity.”

TrueLeap was founded by Bordoloi and Sunny Zhang and developed out of Born Global Ventures, a Houston venture studio focused on advancing immigrant-founded technology. It closed an oversubscribed pre-seed in 2024.

Texas space co. takes giant step toward lunar excavator deployment

Out of this world

Lunar exploration and development are currently hampered by the fact that the moon is largely devoid of necessary infrastructure, like spaceports. Such amenities need to be constructed remotely by autonomous vehicles, and making effective devices that can survive the harsh lunar surface long enough to complete construction projects is daunting.

Enter San Antonio-based Astroport Space Technologies. Founded in San Antonio in 2020, the company has become a major part of building plans beyond Earth, via its prototype excavator, and in early February, it completed an important field test of its new lunar excavator.

The new excavator is designed to function with California-based Astrolab's Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover, a highly modular vehicle that will perform a variety of functions on the surface of the moon.

In a recent demo, the Astroport prototype excavator successfully integrated with FLEX and proceeded to dig in a simulated lunar surface. The excavator collected an average of 207 lbs (94kg) of regolith (lunar surface dust) in just 3.5 minutes. It will need that speed to move the estimated 3,723 tons (3,378 tonnes) of regolith needed for a lunar spaceport.

After the successful test, both Astroport and Astrolab expressed confidence that the excavator was ready for deployment. "Leading with this successful excavator demo proves that our technology is no longer theoretical—it is operational," said Sam Ximenes, CEO of Astroport.

"This is the first of many implements in development that will turn Astrolab's FLEX rover into the 'Swiss Army Knife' of lunar construction. To meet the infrastructure needs of the emerging lunar economy, we must build the 'Port' before the 'Ship' arrives. By leveraging the FLEX platform, we are providing the Space Force, NASA, and commercial partners with a 'Shovel-Ready' construction capability to secure the lunar high ground."

"We are excited to provide the mobility backbone for Astroport's groundbreaking construction technology," said Jaret Matthews, CEO of Astrolab, in a release. "Astrolab is dedicated to establishing a viable lunar ecosystem. By combining our FLEX rover's versatility with Astroport's civil engineering expertise, we are delivering the essential capabilities required for a sustainable lunar economy."

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

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