AUSTIN, Texas — Texas is getting its first major new national stock exchange in decades, and finance experts say it could create new opportunities for Austin’s tech companies and startups looking to grow.

The Texas Stock Exchange is launching this week in Dallas, with live trading expected to begin as early as Friday. The exchange began operations Monday, and it says all publicly traded stocks should be available on the platform by the end of the month. Thousands of publicly traded stocks are expected to be available by then.

Ray Perryman, President and CEO of the Perryman Group, said the launch signals Texas’ growing influence in the financial sector.

“It really lets the world know that Texas is indeed a major player in this industry,” Perryman said.

Gov. Greg Abbott called the exchange another sign of Texas’ expanding economic reach, saying, “This is another step that expands the financial might of Texas in the United States, and cements our economic power on the global stage.”

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Perryman said the exchange could provide another path for companies to go public and could help attract more growing companies to Austin and the rest of the state. He said the added access to capital could have ripple effects across the economy.

“It increases opportunities for firms in the area to expand, have access to capital, to be more profitable. That means they hire more people. That means they pay more taxes. That means they buy more things in their supply chains,” Perryman said.

Texas ranks second in the U.S. for Fortune 500 headquarters, behind California and ahead of New York. With the Texas Stock Exchange set to launch, experts say Austin’s startup community could see even more growth.

Perryman said Austin-area tech firms could benefit from having an in-state exchange option.

“They’ll now have a vehicle here in Texas that will be more efficient and less expensive to register on than the traditional exchanges,” Perryman said.

Perryman said the exchange’s success will depend on how many companies choose to list on it, how much investment it attracts, and how many additional companies decide to move to Texas.

Elon Musk’s electric car manufacturing company Tesla recently leased a 682,000-square-foot speculative industrial building in the Austin Hills Commerce Center. 

The industrial building, which sits at 11801 Decker Lake Road, is set to be completed by January 2027. The project is helmed by Sansone Group and Principal Asset Management, and Musk’s Tesla is set to occupy the second phase of the development, according to reporting from the Austin Business Journal. The total size of the Austin Hills Commerce Center will be 1.4 million square feet when complete. It’s currently unclear what Tesla will utilize the space for. 

The development highlights the increased demand for massive industrial buildings in the Austin area. According to the outlet, there are at least a dozen speculative buildings that span upwards of 400,000 square feet in various stages of development, from finished to the early planning phases. 

Throughout the Austin Metro and across Texas, large swaths of real estate are rapidly becoming Musk’s playground. The world’s richest man has 2.2 million square feet of space around Austin on lease, and more than 10 million square feet that he owns and built. 

The Musk company portfolio includes a reported 112,000-square-foot sublease at the Seaholm Power Plant in downtown for xAI and the airport-adjacent Gigafactory, which spans over 10 million square feet. A $20 billion Terafab campus, that would feature 2 million square feet for research and development, is in the planning stages.

Bastrop County is home to several Musk-owned business’ buildings, most of which are placed along country road FM 1209. Musk is also building an Optimus humanoid robot production facility near the Gigafactory. Musk’s companies have spanned the Austin area’s entire suburban space, from as far north as Taylor to as far south as Kyle. 

Areas outside of Central Texas within the Musk companies include Cameron County, which is the home of Musk’s Starbase that functions as a manufacturing hub as well as the headquarters of SpaceX. The Starbase facility also includes the company’s primary launch site, which was recently relieved of local legal pressure centering around the company’s ability to shut down public Boca Chica Beach for launches. 

— Hunter Cooke

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