01 · Lady Bird Lake
Downtown's river is a lake: Longhorn Dam has held it since 1960, and most motorboats are banned. So the calm water belongs to rowing crews, kayakers and paddleboarders, while runners circle the 10-mile Butler Trail along both shores.
02 · Downtown
In 2018 the Army put its modernization command in the UT System building on 7th Street instead of on a base. In 2025 it merged with TRADOC into T2COM and stayed. Soldiers learn to ship software at ACC's Rio Grande campus, the Army's startup scouts work out of Capital Factory, and two chip companies keep their HQs a few blocks away.
03 · Downtown's towers
Google filled the 35-story Sail Tower by the river, beside the tower where it already had the top 10 floors. Indeed tops the 36-story Indeed Tower, its co-headquarters; Meta has 11 floors of Third + Shoal; and Atlassian, Salesforce, TikTok and Cisco keep offices a few blocks apart.
04 · Along the river
The trading firms came for the engineers. Citadel Securities opened in San Jacinto Center, a block from the lake, in 2019; Hudson River Trading and Goldman Sachs share RiverSouth across the water; and JPMorgan put its Austin headquarters at the top of 405 Colorado.
05 · East Riverside
Oracle moved its headquarters from Redwood City to this campus on the south bank of Lady Bird Lake in December 2020. Larry Ellison has since said the world headquarters will move again, to a campus in Nashville; for now its filings still give Austin.
06 · St. Elmo
A few blocks of warehouses off South Congress now hold a 3D-printed-building company, a microreactor startup, a power-semiconductor maker and a counter-drone weapons company valued at $2.2 billion. Further south in Buda, Perseus Defense is building micro-missiles to knock down drones.
07 · Montopolis to the airport
SEMATECH's original fab is being refit into DARPA's $1.4 billion 3D-chip foundry. Around it: a U.S. trusted-foundry fab, a reactor factory, Saronic's autonomous-ship plant and the site of Base Power's second battery factory.
08 · Giga Texas
Tesla's headquarters sits on about 2,500 acres by the Colorado River, east of the airport: more than 10 million square feet of factory floor building the Model Y, the Cybertruck and 4680 battery cells, with the Cortex AI training clusters under the same roofs.
09 · Bastrop
Twenty miles east, SpaceX builds Starlink dishes in Bastrop: about 700,000 square feet today, a million more planned, and a $280 million chip-packaging line on the way. Next door, The Boring Company builds its Prufrock tunnel boring machines, and since 2025 has run its tunneling worldwide from a control center here.
10 · Zilker Park
West of downtown, Austin cools off in Barton Springs, a pool the city dammed out of the creek in the 1920s. Springs from the Edwards Aquifer keep it between about 68 and 74 °F all year. Next door, Zilker Park's 350 acres fill with picnics and kites, and a miniature train, the Zilker Eagle, runs through it.
11 · East Austin
Motorola came to Austin in 1974 and its fabs live on as NXP. Tracor, Austin's first homegrown defense company, lives on as BAE Systems' electronic-warfare plant. Applied Materials builds chipmaking tools out by Walter E. Long Lake.
12 · Taylor
Samsung's second Texas fab rose out of farmland 40 km northeast of downtown. Backed by a $4.745 billion CHIPS Act award and a $16.5 billion Tesla contract, it began producing AI chips in 2026.
13 · Round Rock
Michael Dell started selling PCs from his UT dorm room in 1984. Ten years later the company settled 20 miles north in Round Rock and never left: One Dell Way is still its global headquarters, and Dell is putting $25 million into the campus.
14 · Parmer Lane
Samsung broke ground on its first U.S. fab here in 1996, with the Longhorn Band and a rodeo. Tech Ridge now builds autonomous cargo drones, and Allen Control Systems is turning a 1991 insurance campus into a counter-drone factory.
15 · West Parmer Lane
Austin has Apple's largest workforce outside Cupertino. Its seven-building Americas Operations Center sits on Parmer Lane, and to the north a $1 billion campus with room for 15,000 people is filling in around a nature preserve. Next door, EA's Austin studio is home to BioWare Austin and EA's worldwide player support.
16 · The Domain
The Domain's towers filled with big tech and finance: Amazon has Domain 9 and much of Domain 10, IBM moved into Domain 12, and Indeed and Vrbo have towers of their own. PayPal and Wise share Domain Tower 2, Optiver's quants work a block away, and next door NVIDIA is growing into One Uptown, by Schwab's 50-acre campus.
17 · Pickle Research Campus
UT's Pickle Research Campus holds the lab behind the Navy's submarine sonar, NSF's new Horizon supercomputer at TACC, and space geodesy. Within a couple of kilometers: Apptronik's humanoids, NI's test gear and new AI chips from Neurophos and Mythic.
18 · Cedar Park
Scottsdale Drive has become a defense corridor: Firefly's mission control and lunar-lander lines, Aeon Industrial's missile factory next door, and Hyliion's linear generators down the road.
19 · Briggs
An hour northwest, Firefly test-fires engines on a 200-acre ranch. In March 2025 its Blue Ghost lander made the first fully successful commercial landing on the Moon.
20 · The Hills
West of MoPac the land climbs the Balcones Escarpment into the Hill Country: the real hills behind Austin's “Silicon Hills” nickname. CesiumAstro is putting $500 million into Bee Cave to build phased-array payloads and whole satellites, AMD, NXP, Ambiq and Intel design chips in the hills, and Dimensional Fund Advisors runs more than $1 trillion from Bee Cave Road.
21 · Congress Avenue Bridge
On warm evenings up to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats pour out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge, one of the largest urban bat colonies in North America. Base Power builds batteries in the old Statesman printing plant next door.
22 · Rainey Street
A few blocks east of the bats, the old bungalows on Rainey Street were rezoned for downtown in 2004 and turned into bars with yards full of string lights, while towers went up all around them. Up on East 6th, crowds fill the street under the neon.
Your turn
Drag the map, search for a company or a landmark, or ride the Red Line from Leander to downtown.
An atlas of who builds what
Austin, rendered — the companies building warships, rockets, humanoids, reactors and the chips inside all of them. Scroll to descend.
Austin
Surveying Central Texas
Silicon Hills · Austin hard tech, mapped