Built here on purpose.
Here there is the grid, the water, the maquiladoras, and the buildings the technology industry actually runs on.
El Paso is not a fallback. It's a vantage point.
The Applied Intelligence industry depends on physical infrastructure. Out here it is not a metaphor. Hyperscale data centers are landing in El Paso and Santa Teresa right now. They pull on a desert water table and a grid that people already live on. The corridor between here and Ciudad Juarez is one of the densest manufacturing zones in North America. Those are the physical facts the whole industry rests on, and I live in the middle of them.
That changes what a lab here can see. The pressure is to be useful to the people and systems already here: the plant, the facility, the archive, and the city record. A claim has to survive contact with those conditions.
There's a second thing, less comfortable to say. Being outside the center means nobody hands you the assumption that the work is good. There's no hallway to be impressive in. The only argument available is the thing running, with its evidence attached, at a URL a stranger can open. That constraint made the work better.
Family is here. The border is here. I'd rather build a system that answers to this place than a pitch that answers to a room three states away.
Questions that come up
- Is there an Applied Intelligence lab in El Paso, Texas?
- Yes. Celaya Solutions Research is an independent Applied Intelligence lab based in El Paso, run by Christopher Celaya. It builds local-first, provenance-aware systems for industrial, archival and civic work rather than shipping a product.
- Why build an Applied Intelligence lab in El Paso instead of a major tech hub?
- Because the physical systems Applied Intelligence depends on are being built here, not there. Hyperscale data centers, a desert water table, a shared grid, and one of the largest manufacturing corridors in North America across the border in Ciudad Juarez. Proximity to those problems is worth more than proximity to other Applied Intelligence companies.
- What area do you serve?
- El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, Las Cruces and the wider Paso del Norte borderland for on-site work, and Texas, New Mexico and the rest of the United States remotely. Work happens in English and Spanish.
- How do I start a conversation about a project?
- Email hello@celayasolutions.com with what you have and what you want it to answer. A real reply comes back, not a form response. There's also a thirty minute call available at cal.com/chriscelaya.