Westwood Holdings CEO Brian Casey on Y'all Street and an ETF tracking the AI power ecosystem

CNBC CEO Council member Brian Casey has a front-row seat on Y'all Street. 

Over the past few years, Dallas has been transformed into a hotbed for the financial services sector, with pledges for massive offices and headcounts coming from firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. 

That's building on the larger growth of industry across sectors in Texas, which now boasts the most Fortune 500 companies among states in the U.S., as well as the massive population boom being seen across the state. 

While the lure of lower taxes and lighter regulations has always drawn companies to Texas, recent pushes to become even more business-friendly have resonated well with the corporate community, especially among executives and companies who have raised issues with legal interpretations coming out of Delaware, such as Elon Musk and ExxonMobil. 

Dallas's efforts to become a corporate hub took another step this summer with the opening of the Texas Stock Exchange, which has received backing from some of the largest institutional investors in the world such as BlackRock, Citadel and Charles Schwab. 

Casey, the CEO of Dallas-based asset manager Westwood Holdings Group, an investor in the TXSE, told us last week he is "very bullish" about what is happening with the exchange.

So what is now luring companies to Dallas and this new exchange, in the eyes of someone with long-standing roots in the community? 

"It's a combination of factors," Casey said, who credits political and business leaders in Texas for working together. 

"First and foremost is, I've always said we're in the center of the country. We have one of the greatest and busiest airports in the world, and you can get to either coast and do a day trip if you need to. It's a very convenient place to travel in and out of, but more than that, we have really tried to take on Delaware from the standpoint of beefing up our business courts, codifying the business judgment rule, and just making it easier and less expensive to incorporate in Texas," Casey said. 

So far, that message seems to be resonating. Pipeline company Energy Transfer and fuel distributor Sunoco both recently announced they would be shifting their listings from NYSE to TXSE. Retailer Dillard's also said it would be shifting from NYSE to TXSE, following the company's move to reincorporate in Texas in 2025. 

Westwood is playing a role as well, launching the exchange's first new ETF, Westwood Salient Enhanced Power & Infrastructure ETF, which will be in addition to other ETFs from the firm already listed on both NYSE and Nasdaq — Westwood itself is listed on NYSE. 

The AI trade has certainly gotten more complicated as the debate around safety and slowing development has grown.   

However, the underlying belief in AI that has made Nvidia the most valuable publicly traded company and pushed AI spending among megacaps to more than $750 billion this year hasn't shown signs of slowing. 

But Casey said while much of the focus from an investor perspective has been on those large-cap companies and chip firms, the underlying energy ecosystem that will power it is now the place to invest. 

That led Westwood to launch this new ETF, which will invest across the power ecosystem from traditional utilities to grid infrastructure and next-generation technologies. 

"It's super interesting when you think about what's happened for the last three years. It's been all about who can build the fastest chip? Who's going to scale the biggest hyperscaler? And so it's all been about demand, and there's insatiable demand for compute power," Casey said. "But every bit of compute power that's generated drags behind it a lot of necessary infrastructure. So big gas turbines, water servers, coolers, and even the skilled labor that's required to build these things." 

Casey said from his firm's vantage point, this energy boom will be a "10-year build out," that will require upwards of $600 billion of investment. "We need 50 gigawatts of power by 2030 [for data centers], and there are 2,000 gigawatts in the [interconnection] queue right now to try to get hooked up to power," he said, highlighting some of the challenges the existing energy grid faces. 

"You do get to a point where you don't really need a faster chip," Casey said. "You got the fastest chip you need, but boy, when it comes to power and all the stuff that goes with it, you can't flip a switch and build that overnight. It takes years and years and years." 

Casey said the symbolism of a Dallas-based asset manager with a Houston-based energy team launching an energy-focused ETF on a Dallas-based exchange is not lost on him, a moment he said reflects "the next chapter of American capital markets."

 "We just have a real economic miracle going on in Texas and in Dallas," Casey said.