Investor Watch: December 4, 2025

“Let’s face it: Working in the office isn’t what it used to be,” write Beth Buckner and Beth Friedrich, leaders of Moore & Van Allen PLLC’ North Carolina-headquartered Economic Development & Incentives practice. Just as management and staff have adjusted, so too must incentives policies adapt. By special arrangement with Site Selection, they offer guidance and concrete examples of innovative practices in an evolving field.

WASHINGTON, DC, INVESTMENT GUIDE 2025

A special report goes in-depth on economic development in the nation’s capital, including:

• A Tech Hub on the Move: How DC is both innovator and customer on the tech front.
• Leading at the Pace of Business: Mayor Muriel Bowser sets an ambitious agenda and exceeds it.
• Why Companies Choose DC
• Partnership President Forges a Winning Path: Derek Ford keeps DC in a leading position for business attraction success.
• Proximity to Influence and Talent Steers New Wave of Firms to DC
• A Conversation with Deputy Mayor Nina Albert: DC is working ahead of schedule to build a welcoming city for all.
• A ‘Monumental’ Era for Sports in the Nation’s Capital: Five stadium projects demonstrate the city’s passion for its pro teams.

LATIN AMERICA & CARIBBEAN

We talk to Amgen’s Thomas Seewoester and Pharma-Bio Serv President and CEO Victor Sanchez about what’s next for the industry on the island.

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Rowen’s two-mile, $33 million Phase 1 roadway and infrastructure project is Georgia’s first officially certified Greenroads Pilot Project and one of several elements showcasing the development’s sustainability and living laboratory principles.
Photo by Adam Bruns

Two weeks ago, on the way back to Atlanta from a field trip to the University of Georgia in Athens, Site Selection’s Alexis Elmore and Adam Bruns grabbed a glimpse of the future at the 2,000-acre development named Rowen, whose early days were first chronicled by Editor Emeritus Mark Arend in 2021. Positioned just off Georgia Highway 316 35 miles from Atlanta, 33 miles from Athens and near the booming north Georgia communities of Gwinnett County, Dacula, Commerce, Gainesville and Jefferson, Rowen (whose name means the second harvesting of a field in the same year) is still in its early days, but the quality of the development and the keen interest from prospects are palpable.

Bob Hughes, principal and founding partner of landscape architecture and design firm HGOR, and Rowen Foundation Director Christina De Giulio cited a study performed by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia (one of many higher education institutions Rowen counts as partners and board members) that examined an 11-county region with Rowen at the center. “Forty-three percent of the growth in Georgia between 2023 and 2050 will occur in our 11-county Rowen region,” Di Giulio said, “almost half the state’s growth. Over the next five years, 46% of working-age population growth [ages 25-64] will be in this region.”

No wonder Rowen’s entitled for up to 22 million sq. ft. of mixed-use development, even as 20% of the land is reserved for nature preservation. Rowen also was approved by Gwinnett County for an Innovation Overlay Zoning District designation. What this means, says Hughes, is when a project meets Rowen’s design guidelines, “we send a letter to the county, and within 10 days the county issues a permit to disturb the land,” a process that normally takes three or four months. “That’s huge when we’re competing with state X or state Y.”

Data centers, warehouses and battery plants need not apply. R&D, science and technology and collaborative corporate environments are more apt matches for Rowen’s “knowledge community” principles and aesthetic.

Watch for more on Rowen in an upcoming Online Insider and in the Georgia Intelligence Report scheduled to appear in the May 2026 issue of Site Selection.
— Adam Bruns

Where opportunity takes off. While winter grips much of the country, Titusville stays bright, warm, and connected. Outdoor recreation, coastal living, and cultural experiences attract professionals who want more than a paycheck. Here, aerospace leaders recruit talent with ease because Titusville offers career opportunity and lifestyle together. In Titusville, growth is paired with sunshine and a sense of place.

AUTOMOTIVE

The region may be named for its bodies of water. But it’s best known for its body of work.

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Among California’s growing data centers is the LAX01 AI-ready data center campus in Vernon, California, operated by Prime Data Centers.
Photo courtesy of Prime Data Centers

Site Selection prides itself on our longstanding data center coverage, including qualifying every major data center facility investment we run across in the Conway Projects Database. But when it comes to data journalism about data centers, we tip our caps to Business Insider’s team, which earlier this fall launched an interactive map tracking them all. Since many data center developers don’t like to reveal too much, the painstaking work, fully explained by Business Insider staff in a documentary, involved submitting public information requests for permitting applications involving backup power generators — something every data center has on hand.

In related news, in November we received a release from the University of California, Riverside, about new research that found that health impacts from pollution associated with California’s computer processing data centers tripled from 2019 to 2023 — “and could rise by another 72% by 2028 unless mitigation policies are enacted.” Electricity use by data centers nearly doubled during the four-year study period, according to a report by UCR computer engineering scholars and produced by the nonpartisan think tank Next 10. Projections show that demand could rise to more than three times 2019 levels by 2028. “At the high end,” said the release, “data centers could consume 25.3 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 2.4 million average American households.”

“California can pioneer a sustainable model for data center growth,” said Shaolei Ren, associate professor in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering and co-author of the report. “But it requires continued commitment from California policymakers and regulators to keep lowering power grid emissions and other externalities such as water consumption. The state should also encourage data centers to replace existing diesel backup generators with cleaner, more reliable technology like long-duration battery storage.”

Meanwhile, the parade of new projects continues: Eight days before the UCR report’s release, Prime Data Centers, an international developer and operator of hyperscale and purpose-built data centers, announced a strategic collaboration with Lambda, the Superintelligence Cloud, to deploy high-density NVIDIA AI infrastructure optimized for large-scale AI training and inference at Prime’s flagship LAX01 AI-ready data center campus in Vernon, California, which “delivers 33 MW of critical power across 242,000 square feet and six data halls, engineered for high-density, GPU-accelerated environments. Lambda will initially lease a portion of the facility representing 21 MW of power,” said the release. “Southern California is fast emerging as a hub for AI innovation, and this deployment will accelerate that growth,” said Leticia Lopez, mayor of Vernon. “Welcoming Lambda to Prime’s LAX01 facility brings cutting-edge AI capabilities to our region, creating new opportunities for businesses and research institutions to scale transformative technologies that will shape the future. The city is proud that its own utility, Vernon Public Utilities, has the full electrical availability to support LAX01’s power needs.” — Adam Bruns

Photo © European Union, 202X, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Opened in July 2022 when an electric supercar made by Croatian company Rimac Group drove across, the €420 million Pelješac Bridge is the largest ever EU investment in infrastructure in Croatia. Connecting the region of Southern Dalmatia with the rest of the country’s mainland, the bridge cut travel time by 37 minutes along the Adriatic coastline, improving people’s lives and increasing economic opportunities for the region. The EU allocated €357 million from Cohesion Policy funds.

Visit Croatia explains, “Anyone who’s traveled by road from Split to Dubrovnik (or vice versa) ever since Croatia gained independence in 1991 will have experienced the fun that is the Neum Corridor, the tiny sliver of Bosnia and Hercegovina that cuts off the southernmost part of Dalmatia from the rest of the country,” meaning having to pass through multiple sets of border controls. Moreover, Croatia joined the Schengen Zone in 2023, which meant the country had to enact stricter border controls with its non-Schengen neighbors as ‘the last’ border of the Schengen Zone in this part of southern Europe, Visit Croatia states. “Traveling through the Neum Corridor now means more border checks, lengthening transit time. The existence of the Peljesac Bridge avoids this.”

An Atlas Obscura post by Alan Newman in October 2024 explained why the bridge was considered by some as one of the most politically controversial bridges ever built.