TCU’s $10 Million AI Investment Takes Center Stage
TCU’s $10 Million AI Investment Takes Center Stage
https://www.tcu.edu/news/2026/tcus-10-million-ai-investment-takes-center-stage.php
Publish Date: 2026-05-26 23:04:00
Source Domain: www.tcu.edu
Carlo Capua, Bob Francis, Kelly Baggett, Adam Powell and Reuben Burch
When Reuben Burch describes the moment artificial intelligence stopped being theoretical,
he starts on a tarmac in Memphis.
As engineering principal for FedEx Express in 2014, Burch helped launch one of the
company’s first autonomous vehicle programs, a “sandbox autonomy” experiment focused
on route planning and collision avoidance among the planes, packages and people of
FedEx’s largest hub. The work put him at the leading edge of machine learning before
the term had become a boardroom staple.
Now TCU’s vice provost for research, Burch is bringing that perspective to TCU.
“Before I was in academia, everyone was panicked about what robots were going to do,”
Burch told an audience at a spring AI panel hosted by Fort Worth Report. “I spent a large part of my career explaining: I don’t want to take your job. I
want to give you a better job. And here we are again with AI.”
TCU’s response is AI², the university’s new artificial intelligence supercomputing infrastructure, a $10
million partnership with Dell and AWS that gives every faculty member and student
access to high-performance AI computing.
Preparing Students for a Prompting…
