Investor Watch: November 27, 2023

VIRGINIA

From Reston to Roanoke, capital investments reach all-time highs across the state.

CARIBBEAN

CooperVision has launched a multi-year investment plan to expand its decades-old footprint on the island, where a thriving life sciences cluster is behind the new Puerto Rico Air Cargo Community logistics initiative.

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A surfer catches a wave on the island of Hawaii.

Photo by Kirk Aeder courtesy of Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA)

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis this month released new state-level data on the economic impact of outdoor recreation. “The value added of the outdoor recreation economy accounted for 2.2% ($563.7 billion) of current‐dollar gross domestic product (GDP) for the nation in 2022,” said the BEA. By percentage of GDP the top states were Hawaii (5.6%), Vermont (4.6%), Montana (4.3%), Wyoming (4.1%) and Alaska (4%). While Lahaina remains fully closed to the public until further notice out of respect for the town’s residents, the West Maui communities of Nāpili, Kāʻanapali, Honokōwai and Kapalua fully reopened on October 8. “Other areas of Maui — Kahului, Wailuku, Kīhei, Wailea, Mākena, Pāʻia, Makawao, and Hāna — need visitors to travel and mālama Maui now more than ever,” said Hawai‘I Tourism United States in September.

Map courtesy of BEA

After falling to record lows in early 2023, water levels in Lake Powell — the second-largest reservoir in the United States — rebounded in the summer of 2023 thanks to above-average snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, “but long-term drought remains,” said a NASA Earth Observatory release accompanying this satellite image made in October.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and lake elevation data from the Bureau of Reclamation.

As Site Selection puts together its 70th anniversary issue to be published in January, we’re looking back at seven decades of past issues as well as perennial issues that never recede into the past. One of them is water, addressed in an exclusive contribution called “The Mispriced Resource” from experts Sudeep Maitra and Martin Stuchtey in our January 2013 issue.

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Photo by Debra Kellner courtesy of the University of Chicago

The National Science Foundation in October awarded $3.7 million to the University of Chicago for the first year of a grant that may provide up to $21.4 million for the final designs for a next-generation set of telescopes to map the light from the earliest moments of the universe — the Cosmic Microwave Background. “Led by the University of Chicago and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the collaboration seeks to build telescopes and infrastructure in both Antarctica and Chile to search for what are known as ‘primordial’ gravitational waves — the vibrations from the Big Bang itself,” said a release from the university.

Known as CMB-S4, the proposed $800 million project would come fully online in the early 2030s. The collaboration currently involves 450 scientists from more than 100 institutions spanning 20 countries. The project will include two large telescopes at this site in the Atacama Desert in Chile where the NSF’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope and other CMB facilities are already in operation and where the Simons Observatory is currently under construction.