Investor Watch: December 15, 2025

Eli Lilly and Company chooses Huntsville, Alabama, from a list of 300 applicants for a new $6 billion pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. Southwest Airlines is bringing a command center and thousands of new jobs to Austin, Texas. QTS starts work on a $13.2 billion data center campus in the village of Cambois in Northumberland County.

SOUTHWEST U.S.

Learn why Vantage Data Centers and 10 other data center projects moved forward in Greater Reno-Sparks-Tahoe, Nevada, over the past year. And hear why California-based Pacific Fusion is investing $1 billion in a new research and manufacturing facility in Mesa del Sol in New Mexico.

DAKOTAS

Data centers, renewables and energy infrastructure are driving corporate expansions in North Dakota and South Dakota. Leaders such as Applied Digital Chairman and CEO Wes Cummins tell Site Selection why.

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Photo courtesy of In-N-Out Burger

Last week saw the ribbon-cutting for Irvine, California-based In-N-Out Burger’s first three restaurant locations in Tennessee, located in Lebanon, Antioch and Murfreesboro. Each location will employ about 75 associates upon opening, with a starting wage of $17.50 per hour. The locations join a string of restaurants located in nine other states, all located west of the Mississippi River.

Site Selection in 2024 reported on the company’s celebration of its 75th anniversary by announcing plans to open a $125 million Eastern territory office in Franklin, Tennessee, in addition to multiple restaurants in the state. According to news reports, thousands of customers waited in line for hours to be among the first to grab at least one Double-Double® Combo (pictured).

COMMUNITY COLLEGES & WORKFORCE TRAINING

A peek into current activity shows how the more than 300 community colleges and public colleges found in the eight Great Lakes states and two Great Lakes provinces are helping companies train and recruit from the region’s talent pool.

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Photo by iStock courtesy of MIT

At a time when stress caused by concerns about the electrical grid is superseded only by the stress on the grid itself, MIT researchers last week published in Nature Energy a new study: “Implications of Policy-Driven Transmission Expansion on Costs, Emissions and Reliability in the United States. A primary focus? Interregional transmission deployment, which has been glacial in pace. Several congressional proposals seek to address the issue.

“This study evaluates these proposals through a representative policy-driven expansion methodology requiring regions to interconnect,” the authors write. “We assess impacts on transmission builds, cost, reliability during extreme events and emissions. We highlight the difference between policy-driven expansion that pursues expansion in all regions and an expansion focused on capturing the benefits of low-cost generation potential. Policy-driven expansion increases interregional transmission by 68%, distributing expansion across regions, whereas the least-cost solution concentrates builds in the central USA. Although the least-cost approach yields US$1.52 billion (1.13%) greater savings and 28.6 million metric tons (3.65%) lower CO2 emissions, policy-driven expansion improves reliability during extreme events by enabling broader electricity exchange.”

From the “Things You Don’t Know Until You Get Out and Walk Around” Department comes the above photo of First Down Park in College Station, Texas, dedicated to College Station native Mason Lee “Red” Cashion, the National Football League referee known for his enthusiastic “FIRST DOOWWWN!” call.

While in town to speak at the YTexas Summit held at the Hall of Champions at Texas A&M University’s Kyle Field last week, I discovered, thanks to the Maps app tracking me through the Lake Walk Innovation District, that one of several expanding Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies (now Fujifilm Biotechnologies) sites Site Selection has reported on in recent years was a stone’s throw from my hotel near the Traditions development. As the sun was setting on my way back from a walk to that site, I came across this lovely pocket park, dedicated in August 2020 after Cashion’s death in February 2019 and located on the same property where he and his wife Lou raised their family. In his final years, Cashion also lived at the Parc at Traditions senior living development less than a mile away in Bryan, Texas (the line separating the two cities runs approximately along Health Science Center Parkway between the Fujifilm site and Traditions). The park, themed around Cashion’s optimism, enthusiasm and positivity, features a number of benches adorned with inspirational plaques, the only pond in the area in which you’re allowed to fish (via the state’s “Neighborhood Fishin” program), and an artwork of five horizontal blocks of stone and gravel that it took me a bit too long to recognize as a football with laces.

Born on the Texas A&M campus where his father worked at the YMCA, Cashion attended A&M on a baseball scholarship (his brother Jimmie was a quarterback at A&M). Known for a 25-year NFL career that included serving as an official at two Super Bowls, the frequent Salvation Army bell ringer also co-founded an insurance company that became part of ANCO Insurance, and was recognized as Brazos County Volunteer of the Year in 1972 and Brazos County Citizen of the Year in 1994 (an honor personally bestowed by President George Herbert Walker Bush). After being inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame in 1999, Cashion saw the locker room for game officials at Texas A&M’s majestic Kyle Field (below) officially named The Red Cashion Officials Dressing Room in 2003. (The Texas A&M Aggies and their famous 12th Man tradition host a first-round College Football Playoff game there on Saturday vs. the University of Miami Hurricanes.)

The Fujifilm complex is described by the company as the largest single-use biomanufacturing campus in North America, “conveniently located in the Brazos Valley Biocorridor — a pro-business community conveniently located near the prestigious Texas A&M University and Blinn College.” Indeed, directly across the street sits a Texas A&M Health Science complex. The company’s Advanced Therapies Innovation Centre is also located on the site. County officials last summer approved an agreement that will see the company invest another $30 million in expansion at the site, bringing its total investment in College Station to $330 million. Adjacent to the Fujifilm site, I watched site preparation and construction underway for the Camwest Crossing 279-unit multifamily development. — Adam Bruns