Speaking at a business conference at Boeing Center at Tech Port, Abbott said the facility will be central to protecting Texas cyber interests, noting that the state is under constant bombardment by cyber attackers. And Military City, USA is the fitting home, he said, thanks to the large number of people working in people working in cyber and IT fields here already.
In the past, Abbott has referred to San Antonio as the "cybersecurity capital of the state of Texas."
The University of Texas at San Antonio will house the $345 million headquarters. The Texas Cyber Command moved in temporarily last month to UTSA's downtown campus, where it will operate until it gets a permanent home.
Abbott said the command hub is central to a new era of security, where "battles" will take place in new places.
"They're not going to take place and the deserts of the the Middle East. They're not going to take place in Eastern Europe," Abbott said. "They're all going to be taken place in space, whether it be outer space or cyber space."
"These cyber attacks are coming from sometimes hostile foreign countries, sometimes private actors within those countries, and there's nothing they would like more than to shut down the state of Texas," he said.
Most recently, there was a June hack of Texas Department of Transportation's database of crash records and a September breach of the state's disaster grant system that compromised the data of more than 40,000 people.
Legislative budget documents show the command will cost $135.5 million through 2027. Over the next five years, it's expected to cost $345.2 million. The command is expected to have a staff of 65 full-time employees by late 2026, growing to 130 the next year.
In September, Abbott tapped Timothy "T.J." White, a Spring native and 33-year Navy veteran, to lead the headquarters. He retired as a vice admiral in 2020 after leading the Navy's cyber forces at Fleet Cyber Command.
Abbott also discussed the effect of artificial intelligence on the Texas economy at the event, hosted by the Texas Association of Business.
Google plans to spend $40 billion over the next two years on AI data centers and related workforce training across Texas. The governor said Texas should be a leader in artificial intelligence due to its abundance of open land and power grid, which he said can meet the heavy electricity load AI infrastructure requires.
Abbott also touted the influx of financial companies to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and the scheduled 2026 opening of the Texas Stock Exchange.
He took the opportunity to take shots at Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist who was elected mayor of New York City earlier this month. He said the new Dallas -based stock exchange will compete with its New York counterpart and position Texas as the "greatest example of capitalism in the United States of America."
"Stock exchanges are maybe the epitome of capitalism. You use them to raise capital, to trade capital, to ensure that businesses are going to have the money they need to be able to operate and to grow," he said. "And what Mamdani stands for is the antithesis of capital and capitalism."
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