INVESTMENT PROFILE Abilene, Texas

Texas Driven to Photo courtesy of Tesla, Inc.

by RON STARNER

Tesla’s decision to park a billiondollar-plant near Austin revs up an already humming sector.

Everyone thought that Amazon HQ2 was the biggest economic development project to hit America until — Tesla came along in 2020.

How big was the impact of the site search for the 2,000acre Gigafactory that Tesla shopped around the country? Huge is an understatement.

Adriana Cruz, Executive Director of the Texas Governor’s Office of Economic Development & Tourism, called it a game-changer. Experts in the automotive world labeled it transformative. Tesla founder Elon Musk himself made it the signature project of his meteoric career.

When the dust settled last July, Musk announced that the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer would locate its Gigafactory for producing the much-ballyhooed Cybertruck in Travis County near Austin, Texas.

Other wins came with it. Along with the futuristic Cybertruck, Tesla would bring manufacturing operations for its new electric semi-truck, the Tesla 3 and the Tesla Y.

The numbers alone are staggering. The project amounts to a $1 billion capital investment that will create 5,000 new jobs in Central Texas just minutes from both Austin Bergstrom International Airport and downtown Austin. Estimates place the total size of the complex between 4 million and 5 million sq. ft.

How did “Project Bob Pole” land