Investor Watch: August 3, 2026

Germany’s MAN Truck & Bus will invest $1.3 billion in southern Poland. Plasma fractionator Octapharma’s $1.5 billion project in Rock Hill will be the largest private biomedical investment in South Carolina history. Meta Platforms and BlackRock are teaming up to pursue the development of a new $14 billion data center campus in El Paso, Texas.

DATA CENTERS

In a report for Brookings Institution, Dany Bahar and Greg Wright discover what the evidence says about data center-associated job creation. We list what Site Selection’s Conway Projects Database says about top states for data center projects and jobs. And in the bonus online story Snapshots from the Field, we present a grab bag of insights that are flooding our inbox at nearly the same pace as the data center announcements themselves.

MAINE

Developer Tony McDonald talks to us about what happened in Jay, Maine, despite support from Maine Governor Janet Mills, and what could happen next.

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Alabama A&M and the Greater Huntsville innovation ecosystem will work with the USPTO in such areas as aerospace, advanced manufacturing, defense technologies, space commercialization and STEM workforce development.
Photo courtesy of Alabama A&M

Following earlier announcements of new offices in Montana and Utah, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which has taken to calling itself “America’s Innovation Agency,” announced on July 6 it had selected innovation ecosystem partnerships in Alabama and Georgia to further the expansion of its Community Engagement Office. “The selection of Georgia and Alabama will focus particularly on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs),” the agency stated, noting that it’s been reimagining its university partnership footprint “to build an agile model of meeting innovators where they are, and more importantly, driving commercialization, manufacturing and marketplace adoption.

“In Georgia,” the announcement continued, “the USPTO will work with universities in the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUCC–Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College) and the Center for Black Entrepreneurship (CBE–founded by Spelman, Morehouse, Black Economic Alliance Foundation, and Bank of America) which has a national reach with its experiential Launch Incubator for Traction (LIFT) program.” The Georgia ecosystem partnership will emphasize commercialization, entrepreneurship, branding, startup ecosystems and innovation acceleration, the agency stated.

In Alabama, “the USPTO will work with Alabama A&M University and the broader Huntsville-area innovation ecosystem, including stakeholders connected to aerospace, advanced manufacturing, defense technologies, space commercialization and STEM workforce development,” the USPTO said. “Huntsville serves as one of the nation’s leading strategic technology corridors with substantial federal research, engineering, and commercialization activity connected to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Redstone Arsenal, and the region’s advanced manufacturing and aerospace sectors.”

The USPTO said the choice of Alabama and Georgia was based on “robust research activity and graduate-level programs of study in areas which lead to innovations, IP and IP-intensive companies/industries; availability and concentration of existing commercialization and business development resources, and the ability to support all innovators.

How can you measure the patents associated with geographic locations? In January 2024 we posed that question to USPTO staff for a Site Selection Snapshot titled “Looking for Innovation Locations? Take a Dive Into the Patent Data.” As we wrote then, the work using their data tools can be worth it because it can “provide not only a statistical dimension to a location search, but direct connections to a region’s under-the-radar intellectual property domains.”

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Leaders from Georgia Power last week joined U.S. Department of Energy and local officials to mark the start of construction of two new combined-cycle natural gas units that will add nearly 1,500 megawatts (MW) of reliable generation at Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant in Bartow County that first started up in 1971. The plant will also host a new 500-MW battery energy storage system (BESS).
Photo courtesy of Georgia Power

Denver-based CoBank in late July unveiled a new report documenting what it calls “the hard pivot” back to natural gas. “Gas-fired generation capacity in development has more than tripled over the past two years, driven largely by the power needs of data centers, AI infrastructure and a resurgence in industrial activity,” CoBank said in a release. “The revival in gas capacity development reflects a clear shift in the power industry’s planning priorities toward firm, scalable generation. However, mounting headwinds could make this development cycle slower, more costly and inflationary for power prices.”

Among other factors, “equipment bottlenecks, congested interconnection queues and a more diverse sponsor mix will limit how much new gas-fired capacity can realistically be added to the grid over the next decade,” CoBank stated. “Geographic constraints on generation, transmission and fuel infrastructure will also limit the ability to site new gas plants near load clusters.”

“Co-ops that stage procurement decisions, preserve optionality and evaluate projects against realistic equipment, interconnection and fuel-deliverability timelines will be better positioned than those that assume announced capacity will arrive on schedule,” says Teri Viswanath, CoBank’s lead energy economist. “The most likely outcome is that this new cycle of gas-fired development will be defined more by new plant announcements than by actual ribbon cuttings.”

Photo courtesy of Alabama Port Authority

This image of the Port of Mobile accompanied a July 30 release from the Alabama Port Authority announcing that Fitch Ratings had upgraded the Alabama Port Authority’s Dock Facilities Revenue Bonds to an A- rating with a Stable Outlook, “citing its strong financial position, disciplined capital planning and an increasingly diversified revenue base.”

“We’re continuing to invest in modern facilities and infrastructure while maintaining a strong financial foundation,” said Alabama Port Authority Director and CEO Doug Otto. “That puts us in a position to better serve our customers and continue driving economic development across Alabama.”

Among other growth, the Port Authority announced in June that construction is underway on Ray-Mont Logistics’ new export-focused transloading facility at the Port of Mobile, Ray-Mont’s third facility in the United States and the Canadian bulk logistics provider’s first on the Gulf Coast. Expected to begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2026, the transloading facility will increase exports of plastic resin packaging, forest products and other goods. Ray-Mont’s operations are projected to add approximately 60,000 TEUs of annual export volume through the Port of Mobile once the facility’s first phase is fully operational.

The Port Authority noted that the facility will benefit from the recently completed effort to widen and deepen Mobile’s shipping channel to 50 feet, establishing the Port of Mobile as the deepest container port on the Gulf Coast.