BROWNSVILLE, Texas - The City of Brownsville is hosting a workshop May 6 to explain the way different city departments are utilizing artificial intelligence.
The city has invited the IT departments of all the major cities in the Rio Grande Valley to attend the workshop in order to learn best practices.
Among the high tech companies that will be participating are Nvidia and Lenovo. The event will be held at the Brownsville Events Center.
“Mark your calendars - May 6. Were bringing in Nvidia, Lenovo, and others and we're going to host a demo and a workshop on what are we doing on artificial intelligence,” said Jorge Cardenas, chief information office for the City of Brownsville.
“We are inviting all IT departments in the region all the way from Mission to Brownsville. We are going to explain how they can leverage our own infrastructure for the betterment of their communities.”
Cardenas said the City of Frisco, Texas, will be sending its IT specialists to the workshop. Asked why this is, Cardenas said: “Because Frisco is going to be involved in the World Cup. They have been asking a lot about camera analytics, and we're doing a lot of that here, with crowd monitoring.”
Sweden has selected Frisco as its base camp for the World Cup.
Cardenas made his comments about the upcoming workshop in a conversation with the RGG Business Journal following a podcast about the roll out to the City of Brownsville’s lightning-fast fiber internet service.
Thus far, the city has installed 100 miles and 576 strands of fiber across Brownsville..Working with its private partners, with Omni Fiber, the service is being expanded into Olmito, Rancho Viejo, and Los Fresnos. In time, it could also include San Benito, Port Isabel, South Padre Island and even Harlingen.
During the podcast, Cardenas spoke about the importance of data centers. He said he was “very involved” in discussions about bringing more data centers to the region.
“The massive companies that we have here, they need to compute. They need data centers close by to run whatever they are doing. So, I have to say that in a data center is needed in the region. It is definitely needed, but I think we need to do a better job at educating the community and leadership on the impact of a data center,” Cardenas said.
“Right now we are here talking, we have people are on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. Where do you think all that compute is happening? Where do you think all that data is being processed? It is being processed in a data center? So, as we grow, as we need more of that bandwidth, we need more data centers.”
Cardenas said not all data centers are the same.
“There are different sizes of data centers. I think is we have got to do a better job in educating the community on the impact of a data center and to really fully understand the impact of it. Yes, they do need energy. They do the water. But not all of them do. But they come in different sizes and it might be that we could bring one to two into Brownsville without jeopardizing the resources that we have. I can tell you, it's possible. I've been looking into it and it is possible. It is just a matter of educating the community on the impact.”
