White House Designates 31 Emerging Tech Hubs

The White House has designated 31 tech hubs across 32 states and the territory of Puerto Rico, authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August 2022. Each hub can apply for between $40 million and $70 million for a total of almost $500 million in implementation funding.

The announcement is the first phase of the new Tech Hubs program, which is an economic development initiative designed to strengthen a region’s capacity to manufacture, commercialize, and deploy technology, according to the White House.

The program invests directly in burgeoning, high-potential U.S. regions that represent both urban and rural areas. Ten of the hubs are split across between two and four states. Some states are home to more than one hub.

Each of the hubs is focused on some aspect of technology: safe and effective autonomous systems; maintaining quantum edge; advancing biotechnology; energy transition; critical minerals supply chain; semiconductor manufacturing; and materials manufacturing.

The ultimate intent is to create a phenomenon that has occurred naturally in a few areas in the country, such as the 128 and 495 rings around Boston, Silicon Valley, and the Research Triangle in North Carolina.

However, each of these tech hubs were a result of university resources and research, professors and graduate students, spin-off companies, and a naturally growing educated and specialized labor force. It isn’t clear whether a similar type of result can be created artificially even with federal funding.

Still, though, developers might want to put these 31 hubs on a watch list in light of a recent Moody’s report that found that emerging tech hubs have different office dynamics than the major cities, such as San Francisco, which have seen significant vacancies. “While established tech titans have suffered a 20-basis point (bps) increase in vacancy so far this year, emerging tech markets recorded a remarkable 70 bps decline on average,” Moody’s said.