Ashlee Vance visits Proto Town, a rural Texas factory complex where startups live and work on-site. Evan is building a solar-powered air-conditioning system using chemical layers to absorb heat and release cool air for warehouses and data centers. The community runs 24/7 with an experimental, almost prank-like energy.
My real exploration of Prototown began in earnest the next day. The Qubi! Behold! I made my way over to an inflatable factory that has served as the first center of gravity for startups here. People work day and night on a handful of different projects. And many of them live on the grounds. The first pioneer I encountered was Evan, and he wants to build solar-powered air conditioning.
They look like solar panels. This is one of our prototypes. Okay. They basically take heat from the sun and they have very thin layers of chemical reactions. So like endothermic, you know, cooling reactions that basically charge like a battery and then they release it as cooling.
Okay, so it's just taking the heat from the sun. Right. And then there's some kind of like chemical spread throughout this panel.
Mm-hmm.
The cold air just like comes out of the panels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, these are meant for buildings, they're meant for houses?
So large infrastructure warehouses. Okay. Warehouses through data centers through the military. And so we'll be doing like this building, some of the other buildings that they're planning in Proto Town.
And how long have you been in Proto Town?
I moved here April 1st, kind of as an April Fool's joke to my parents. Okay.
Dude, do you like working in the cube? It's hot.
