Investor Watch: November 3, 2025

Canada’s Aclara Resources will establish a heavy rare earths separation facility in Vinton, Louisiana, near the Texas state line. California-based Lambda will invest nearly $500 million to turn a vacant data center into a lively one. Citing reshoring of activity by major pharma customers, Cambrex will reinvest at the nation’s largest API manufacturing site in Iowa.

COVER STORY

Find out why, learn which states made the top 10, read Mark Arend’s conversation with Gov. Greg Abbott and learn from Ray Perryman’s analysis of the state as talent magnet.

OPPORTUNITY ZONES

Kenan Fikri, senior fellow at Economic Innovation Group (the firm that originally championed Opportunity Zones) offers exclusive analysis of the true opportunities ahead for companies and communities, especially in rural America.

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Built in 1952, the Oberer Letten riverside swimming and sunbathing facility (flussbad) along the River Limmat in the heart of Zurich offers a 400-meter swimming channel, beach volleyball and other amenities.
Archive photo by Cemil Erkoc courtesy of Zürich Tourism

Global residence and citizenship advisory firm Henley & Partners, in partnership with AI-powered analytics platform AlphaGeo, last month released the Global Investment Risk and Resilience Index. “The index is the first of its kind to measure countries’ exposure to geopolitical, economic, and climate risks as well as their capacity to adapt and recover,” the firms stated in a release, “revealing how resilience is increasingly concentrated in smaller, highly adaptive states. These are the places you want to be if you can.”

Site Selection readers will recognize some familiar names atop the list from past editions of the publication’s Global Best to Invest, Smart Cities (including this exclusive Q&A with Switzerland-based Christos Cabolis, chief economist at the IMD World Competitiveness Center) and other rankings. In this new analysis, Switzerland is No. 1, followed by Denmark, Norway, Singapore and Sweden. Among G7 nations, Germany at No. 9 leads the way, followed by Canada (No. 11) and the UK (No. 19).

“Resilience now matters more than wealth or political structure as the true driver of future success as we have entered a more volatile phase of history,” says Dr. Christian H. Kaelin, chairman at Henley & Partners. “For nations, it underpins lasting prosperity. For investors and global families, it offers both protection and a powerful engine for long-term value creation.”

OVERVIEW: POLICY

In the first story from the inaugural “Great Lakes Investment Guide 2025: A Region Rises,” Ron Starner examines top policy issues in this eight-state, two-province region that is home to one-fifth of the planet’s freshwater supply.

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Graphic courtesy of The Electricity Journal

An early peek at the December 2025 edition of The Electricity Journal offers a glimpse of “Factors influencing recent trends in retail electricity prices in the United States,” a report by Lawrence Berkeley Senior Scientist Ryan Wiser and four co-authors. Among its 10 conclusions, while utility-scale wind and solar “are not — alone — broadly related to recent price increases,” the researchers found that behind-the-meter solar “was associated with higher prices.” They also find that, contrary to concerns about higher prices due to the glut of data centers and increased domestic manufacturing, “our analysis finds that state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices.”

Photo courtesy of USGBC

This week Greenbuild, the world’s largest green building conference and expo, takes place in Los Angeles. Presented in partnership with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the event gathers together more than 10,000 green building professionals and more than 250 exhibitors from over 60 countries. The USGBC and the Hong Kong Green Building Council organized “The Beauty of Green Buildings Through the Lens of Architects,” an exhibition of over 80 art works, at Taikoo Place in Hong Kong in September.

Hong Kong has accumulated nearly 500 LEED-certified projects with a collective certified area of over 110 million sq. ft., entering the top 10 LEED markets globally for the first time in 2024. “Over the past five years, LEED-certified buildings in Hong Kong have achieved a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.4%,” said a USGBC release, noting that office and retail projects account for approximately 80% of all LEED certifications in Hong Kong. One of those office projects is K11 Atelier King’s Road, where exhibited photographer James Yip made this photograph entitled “The Magic Moment on My Office Rooftop.”