Investor Watch: August 11, 2025

Applied Materials’ new agreement to supply Texas Instruments’ U.S. factories from Applied’s Austin facility means a new facility is coming to Greater Phoenix. Rivian places its East Coast HQ in Atlanta. A new data center complex from QTS will be the largest economic development project in Iowa’s history.

DATA CENTERS

Christopher D. Lloyd of McGuireWoods Consulting examines how several states have added or enhanced their data center incentives to capture a growing market.

WEST VIRGINIA

Designed to boost microgrid development to facilitate the expansion of data centers, West Virginia’s Power Generation and Consumption Act will expedite the project permitting process while also accelerating an “all of the above” approach to energy development that includes coal, natural gas and renewable energy.

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A new flagship store opened at Under Armour’s new corporate campus on the Baltimore Peninsula last December.
Photo courtesy of Under Armour

Changes to a planned unit development at Tide Point by developer 28 Walker that were approved by the City of Baltimore’s planning commission last week would allow Cristo Rey Jesuit High School to relocate to part of the former Under Armour corporate campus there where town homes were originally planned. Final approval of the PUD changes depends on a public hearing and city council vote in the fall.

Under Armour moved its headquarters last year to a new $5.5 billion campus on the Baltimore Peninsula that Site Selection originally chronicled the plans for in April 2016, when former Senior Editor Patty Rasmussen talked with Under Armour’s then-Vice President of Global Corporate Real Estate Neil Jurgens (now with Fidelity Investments).

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The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), here photographed in May 2024, is but one part of the massive Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Photo courtesy of SRS

After receiving high interest in response to its April request for information, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on July 24 announced it had selected four sites — Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky and Savannah River Site in South Carolina — to move forward with plans to invite private sector partners to develop AI data center and energy generation projects in keeping with the Trump administration’s goals of utilizing federal lands to lower energy costs and “help power the global AI race,” said an official DOE release.

“By leveraging DOE land assets for the deployment of AI and energy infrastructure, we are taking a bold step to accelerate the next Manhattan Project — ensuring U.S. AI and energy leadership,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who two weeks later was near Savannah River Site to open a new Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative on the campus of the University of South Carolina-Aiken.

DOE said more details regarding project scope, eligibility requirements and submission guidelines at each site will be available in site-specific releases expected to be released in the coming months, with partners potentially selected by the end of the year. “DOE is also evaluating additional sites that could issue solicitations in the future,” the release stated.

Site Selection in July 2024 outlined the tremendous value to be found at DOE’s 17 National Laboratories, whose facilities stretch across 24 locations.

Photo courtesy of DOE

At Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the Idaho Chemical Processing Facility originated as a support facility for the Materials Test Reactor to “recover fissionable material from spent fuel elements,” says a DOE archive. INL, an 890-square-mile section of desert in southeast Idaho, was established in 1949 as the National Reactor Testing Station, where 52 reactors were built. Among them was Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1(EBR-1), now a Registered National Historic Landmark open to the public, where in 1951 the first use of nuclear fission to produce a usable quantity of electricity took place.