The industrial revolution is accelerating in deep South Texas, where more than $110 billion in projects are underway or have been announced this year.
For more than a century, the Rio Grande Valley’s economy was defined by agriculture, producing jobs, as well as cash crops like citrus, cotton, sorghum and sugarcane. Now, the Valley is at the vanguard of aerospace, artificial intelligence and energy, as well as national defense and international trade.
Nowhere has that revolution become clearer than in Cameron County. With about 435,000 residents, it is the second-largest of the Valley’s four counties. But over the last year, tens of billions of dollars in investments have leapfrogged it ahead of neighboring Hidalgo County and its population of nearly 1 million. The two loci of those investments? The Port of Brownsville and Starbase, headquarters of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Major energy and defense firms announce plans for the Port of Brownsville
The Port of Brownsville has $64 billion in investment underway, Gilberto Salinas, president of the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation, said during an October workforce conference on South Padre Island, according to the Rio Grande Guardian. The only deepwater port on the U.S.–Mexico border, it is also the largest land-owning port authority in the country with about 40,000 acres available for development. That wide open space has attracted multibillion dollar companies to the region, as well as some of the nation’s top leaders…