geaviationGE Aviation is in Austin.

The business, a division of General Electric based in Cincinnati, Ohio, officially opened up its Austin digital collaboration center last week. It is the first in the U.S. In the past year, GE opened similar centers in Dubai, Shanghai and Paris.

The company also announced it is working with customer Qantas Airways on a data and analytics project aimed at providing solutions for aviation fleet intelligence and operational insights.

GE Aviation Chief Digital Officer, Jim Daily, officially opened the center with Qantas Head of Fuel and Environment Alan Milne. Local officials participating in the event included State Representative Paul Workman, State Representative Celia Israel and Ahmed Tewfix, chairperson of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.

“GE’s collaboration center in Austin is home to software developers, data scientists and domain experts with specific backgrounds in analytics, flight-planning and engines, depending on what we’re working on,” Daily said in a news release. “Opening the center with Qantas, marks the commitment from a customer who really understands the value of using data across their operation.”

The center occupies 27,000 square feet at 400 W 15th Street with 100 data scientists, engineers and designers. GE Aviation plans to hire many more within the next year.

“We’ve seen that even small gains in fuel efficiency add up to big benefits and lower emissions when you multiply them across the hundreds of aircraft in the Qantas fleet,” Milne said in a news release. “The work we’re doing with GE is giving us more insight than we’ve ever had before into the way our aircraft operate, helping us find ways of flying smarter – and this is the next step in the partnership.”

Today, nearly 100 airlines covering more than 10,000 aircraft are GE Aviation Digital Solutions’ customers for such services as flight and fuel analytics, navigation services, airline operations management and planning and recovery.

Four years ago, GE Aviation acquired Austin Digital, a 40 employee startup that specialized in flight operations data analysis.