Oh, no, not again! Moribund Maryland has just lost yet another corporate headquarters to Virginia. BigBear.ai has moved its HQ from Columbia, Maryland to a Class A trophy office building in Tysons, Virginia, The Business Journals reports. Its new address is the Valo Park building at 7950 Jones Branch Drive. The move caps off a month of great news for the company and its investors. It not only picked up coveted new contracts from the Army and Navy, but hired a new CEO who was a high-level adviser to President Donald Trump, giving it an edge in any DOGE-sizing at the Pentagon.
Valo Park not only enjoys easy access to I-495, but its website notes it is only a 15-minute drive from Dulles International Airport. No Montgomery County or Maryland business can make that claim, as leaders of both jurisdictions for decades have blocked construction of the long-planned I-370 Potomac River crossing to the Dulles area. Montgomery County hasn't attracted a single major corporate headquarters in over 25 years, and Maryland's record is about the same. Both have lost many HQs to Virginia, among other states, and now the trend continues to play out. Tysons is the happening place to be; you can feel the energy just driving through on the Beltway, among all of the neon corporate logos that light up the night. Montgomery County is Sleepy Town, a bedroom community for the booming job centers elsewhere in the region - such as Tysons!
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The loss of BigBear.ai is particularly humiliating for Maryland, as Governor Wes Moore has stated that artificial intelligence is one of the key economic sectors he wants to grow. Alas, Maryland not only has much higher taxes, but much less electricity generation capacity, after the Democrat-controlled Maryland legislature forced the closure of 8 coal-fired power plants. They apparently were unaware that artificial intelligence requires massive amounts of energy. Virginia has that capacity, while Maryland has to import expensive electricity from out-of-state at boardwalk prices just to keep the lights on. We're being governed by very stupid people, folks. Heckuva job, Brownie!
I don't blame them.
ReplyDeleteAgree with critique of Maryland having no clue on economic development. On electricity, coal plants are inefficient, expensive, and dirty. Natural gas is great—cleaner, cheaper, etc. And locating a corporate office isn’t tied to electric generating capacity; locating an actual data center is. But that’s more about quality of the wires and infrastructure and not location of plants. Electrons don’t care about state lines and Maryland and Virginia are in the same wholesale market (PJM). Maryland should build more generation because it’s needed and creates local economic benefits, but it’s not like Maryland plants would obly serve Maryland or Maryland customers can only use electricity produced here.
ReplyDeleteIt's not incompetence, it's communist economic policy, it's all done with intent. Most black women with fake college degrees work for government no work jobs
ReplyDeleteTrue
DeleteHave you met Maryland legislators? It’s definitely incompetence and not some grand design on anything. They might be trying to hew to a trendy ideological line, but mostly it’s just an enormous sense of entitlement and intellectual laziness.
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