All Forum Posts by: Neil Narayan

Samsung's interest in multiple Central Texas sites for a planned $17 billion chipmaking plant is coming into focus.

Samsung is seeking Chapter 313 property tax abatements from Taylor Independent School District for its potential plant, according to documents posted on the state comptroller’s website. Travis County on July 15 also uploaded an agenda for its July 20 commissioners court meeting that includes plans to discuss Samsung's application for an economic development performance agreement there.

If Samsung chooses Austin or rural Taylor, the company’s $17 billion investment — one of the largest foreign investments in recent U.S. history — would catapult Central Texas into a new era of semiconductor technology. Samsung has had a factory in North Austin since 1997.

About 1,800 direct jobs would be in tow, not to mention the thousands of indirect jobs, such as construction work. Other corporate investments would surely follow such a project, experts have said. The company could attract new talent to the area, adding to the already competitive housing market.

https://www.bizjournals.com/au...

lol

LOL

When companies move their headquarters out of California, they choose Texas way more than they choose any other state. Since Jan. 1, 2018, some 107 companies have moved their headquarters to Texas from the Golden State, according to Vranich, president of McKinney-based site-selection consulting firm Spectrum Location Services. The next winningest destination in that time period was Tennessee with 22 relocations from California. Put another way, Texas lured five times more California headquarters than its next closest competitor.

Within Texas, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth are dominating. Why are so many California companies choosing Austin and DFW when they move to Texas?

Austin has successfully portrayed itself as Silicon Hills. So if you're into the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem, as they like to call it, and you want to have that familiarity about you, you go to Austin. If you want to find software writers and people who know how to promote a digitally oriented company, you go to Austin.

https://www.bizjournals.com/au...

The roughly $110 million plant, which is expected to employ about 580 workers at build-out, represents a major economic score for the Hill Country city, considering the public incentive package offered to land the project included a $3.3 million land acquisition grant and $1.8 million in infrastructure improvements.

https://www.bizjournals.com/au...

The District ("mini Domain") will be a a 65.5-acre mixed-use project featuring multifamily residential, hotels, offices, retail stores and restaurants and a grocery store.​ The open space master plan includes "livable" streets designed to heighten driver awareness of pedestrian activity, enhanced detention areas, greens, plazas and courtyards.​The development is also expected to create 5,000 jobs when it is fully developed. The Round Rock City Council voted unanimously Thursday, June 10, to approve Planned Unit Development (PUD) zoning for The District, a 65.5-acre mixed-use project planned for SH 45 just east of IH 35.

https://www.roundrocktexas.gov...

CE Shop, they have coupons ranging from 35-50% off

Switch Inc. has announced plans to open a 1.5 million-square-foot data center, dubbed "The Rock," next to Dell Technologies in Round Rock.

https://www.bizjournals.com/au...

The company said it is deciding between Florida, Texas and Arizona for a proposed 1-million-square-foot factory that would employ at least 3,000 people. KORE Power, which was founded in 2018, said this would be the first lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility owned by a U.S. company.

In addition to the 3,000 would-be KORE Power employees, the company estimated that the new plant would bring an additional 10,000 direct and indirect jobs to the selected region.

Meanwhile, electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc., which uses lithium-ion batteries in its cars, has a $1.1 billion factory rising just east of Austin. The company has signaled in public filings it intends to produce batteries at the site. Lithium-ion technology has a solid history in Austin: John Goodenough, a University of Texas at Austin professor, won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention of lithium-ion batteries. EnergyX, a technology company that focuses on lithium extraction, is hiring for its Austin office.

https://www.bizjournals.com/au...

Those with an eye on recent history can't be blamed for thinking current market conditions are nearing their endgame, with rapid price appreciation and fierce competition for homes eerily reminiscent of the late stages of the mid-2000s housing boom. March marked the largest one-month increase ever recorded in the more than 25-year history of the Zillow Home Value Index — surpassing even the housing run-up preceding the Great Recession — and the 10.6% rise from March 2020 was the largest annual increase in 15 years.

But that view ignores the fact that the housing market doesn't operate in a vacuum, and is driven by the interactions of a number of relatively simple but critically important fundamentals — including supply and demand, financial conditions and technological advancement. And the state of those fundamentals in 2021 is ultimately far healthier, and that health far more likely to be sustainable over the longer-term, than the out-of-whack fundamentals from a generation ago.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news...