GULF COAST PORTS

Gulf Coast ports usher in an era of resiliency and record-setting deals.

QUEBEC

Northvolt’s investment affirms the province’s aggressive battery strategy, writes Gary Daughters in this expanded web edition.

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Three projects valued at more than $1 billion each are coming to these three spots on the globe from AstraZeneca, Google and Asahi Kasei, respectively.

In 2017, more than 30,000 employees worked out of 50 buildings at the Infosys campus in Bengaluru, India. As of 2024, the company employs more than 317,000 worldwide.

Archive photo courtesy of Infosys

Our August 2017 Online Insider featured an interview with Ravi Kumar, then-president and deputy COO of Infosys, about the Indian technology services and outsourcing giant’s plan to create 10,000 U.S. jobs at a number of new hubs in Indiana, North Carolina and beyond.

Reporting last year by James Briggs for Axios found things weren’t exactly proceeding as planned in Indy, where the company, like others navigating its way back from pandemic office trends, had qualified for only $15.4 million of the $117 million in state and city incentives offered for what was projected to be the creation of 3,000 new jobs. “Infosys claimed in an email to the city last year to have hired more than 1,000 people, but it's unclear how many of those employees are remote,” Briggs wrote. “Infosys declined to share Indianapolis hiring numbers or answer questions about construction.” The company in December, however, DID inaugurate a new center in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, that will accommodate 3,000 jobs “in alignment with Infosys’ future-ready hybrid workplace strategy.”

Meanwhile, Ravi Kumar has moved on to be CEO of Cognizant, a fast-growing company in its own right. Site Selection’s Conway Projects Database has tracked half a dozen projects from the company since early 2022, including a 200-job project in Missoula, Montana; a 300-job investment in Austin, Texas; and a 1,250-job center in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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The paper’s authors found that the No. 1 employer of global workforce with chip manufacturing skills is Intel, which in April completed assembly of the industry’s first commercial High Numerical Aperture (High NA) Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanner at the company’s R&D site in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Photo courtesy of Intel

A Marketplace story last week highlighted a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that suggests new tariffs placed by the United States on Chinese semiconductors may not have the impact on domestic hiring that some hope they have. The paper, “When Protectionism Kills Talent,” also traces “the trajectories of undergraduate and graduate cohorts possessing chip-related skills over time” and documents what the authors call “significant shifts away from the chip industry.” Among the tools they use is the database of Revelio Labs, which they say “positions itself as a company that collects and standardizes hundreds of millions of publicly available employment records to create the ‘world’s first universal HR database,’ ” allowing users to see workforce dynamics and trends. The authors scraped information about nearly 1 billion employees in March 2023.

Photo by Serge Brunier courtesy of NASA and MIT

The universe sure has some SASS, as in Small Accreted Stellar System. That’s the name MIT researchers have given to what they’re calling three of the oldest stars in the universe that happen to reside in the Milky Way galaxy’s “halo” or cloud of stars enveloping the main galactic disk. An MIT release said the stars “appear to have formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago, when the very first galaxies were taking shape.” The researchers believe “each star once belonged to its own small, primitive galaxy that was later absorbed by the larger but still growing Milky Way,” wrote Jennifer Chu of MIT. “Today, the three stars are all that are left of their respective galaxies. They circle the outskirts of the Milky Way, where the team suspects there may be more such ancient stellar survivors” out there amongst the more than 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.