CETA and the AI Center are White Elephants. By Ramon Salcito. In Ciudad Juarez, spaces have been built that promise to connect the region with the economy of the future. Innovation, artificial intelligence, and technological development. On paper, the CETA and the Artificial Intelligence Center represent precisely that the possibility for the border region to stop assembling goods and start creating. In practice, however, the gap between rhetoric and reality is becoming increasingly apparent. Because in a city that thrives on industry and competes daily in global markets, innovation cannot be merely aspirational. It must be measurable, visible, and above all useful. That's where the uncomfortable questions arise. Where are the projects that link these institutions with the Maquiladora or local industry? What concrete solutions are they generating? What is their real impact on local competitiveness? When these answers are not clear, what should be an engine of development begins to look like something else? Rather, without beating around the bush or using euphemisms, both projects are white elephants that only consume resources but contribute nothing. The CETA, Center for Innovation and Integration of Advanced Technologies, is, so far, an example of how a grandiose name seems to replace results. Beneath a label that boasts of cutting-edge technology and development, what truly stands out is an absence that is difficult to justify. There is insufficient public evidence of productive projects, effective links with industry, or concrete contributions to the competitiveness of Ciudad Juarez. And that gap is significant. It involves public resources, infrastructure, and a city that urgently needs to take the leap towards greater added value. In this context, the lack of results ceases to be a technical oversight and becomes a fundamental problem. While the discourse remains comfortably confined to the institutional narrative, the real economy continues to wait for more than just promises. The question then becomes unavoidable. Who is responsible for this? How much has been invested in CETA, and what concrete results can it show today? In any serious innovation project, the indicators are clear. Projects underway, partner companies, implemented solutions. Here, however, opacity and a lack of results begin to outweigh any rhetoric. But there's a fundamental question that no one seems to have answered. Who came up with the idea that Macaladoras would open up their designs, blueprints, and processes to be improved by third parties? In an industry where confidentiality is the rule, not the exception, that premise is not only optimistic, it's completely out of touch with the sector's operational reality. From the beginning there was talk of providing improvement services to Macualadora companies, but the idea never quite took hold in common sense. First, millions were invested in infrastructure with more aspirational than viable goals. Then came the clash with reality. There was no connection, no adoption, no click. And when a project is born disconnected from the logic of its own market, the result is usually the same: facilities that exist but have no impact. In practice, the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez already has fully functional laboratories within the Institute of Engineering and Technology, whose activity and scope clearly surpass what is currently observed at CETA. This raises an inevitable question. Why duplicate infrastructure if the existing one already has proven capabilities? What emerges is a potential duplication of functions that is not only inefficient, but also difficult to justify in terms of public policy. Because if an institution is already generating tangible results, creating another parallel structure with no visible impact doesn't add anything. It simply disperses resources. And in the worst-case scenario, it raises the most uncomfortable question of all: whether anything is actually being accomplished there. Therefore, there is an existential problem at CETA, but also at the so-called Artificial Intelligence Center, where nothing related to or impactful on the subject is evident. Perhaps a course or two to justify the budget, but nothing more. The state government's Innovation and Development Secretariat must soon give an account of this and other projects that are lying dormant, as if the city's economic reality were one of extreme prosperity. And they must do so with speed and much greater clarity in their goals and objectives than when those multimillion dollar projects were launched. Perhaps if that money had been invested in the stock market or some type of fixed income investment, it would be yielding much more than it has so far, if such a comparison is permissible. As far as we know, they have invested more than 250 million pesos, but with such poor judgment that there is nothing that can be boasted as a great benefit for such a high cost.