North Carolina's 1950s economy ran on tobacco, textiles, and furniture. In 1954 the state's own Research Commission concluded its most underused asset was three research universities -- Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State -- sitting an hour apart, and Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 as a deliberate, state-organized bet on that idea. Nothing else landed for half a decade until IBM arrived in 1965 with a 400-acre research facility built for its System/360 mainframe project, becoming the Park's anchor tenant for the next sixty years and eventually its largest employer, at times topping 10,000 workers on one site. In 2025, IBM is consolidating that same workforce into a single leased building and exploring options for its original campus, down to roughly 8,000 employees across the Triangle. The same year, North Carolina pulled in $10.8 billion in life sciences manufacturing investment -- Novo Nordisk's $4.1 billion Clayton expansion, Johnson & Johnson's $2 billion Wilson biologics campus, Fujifilm's $3.2 billion Holly Springs plant, and Biogen's newly announced $2 billion addition to roughly $10 billion it has already invested in the Triangle since 1995. Even Apple's marquee 2021 win needed a four-year extension in November 2025 after construction stalled. The Park now covers 7,000 acres and 22.5 million square feet, home to 300-plus companies and more than 50,000 employees -- and the state that built the Park by fiat in 1959 is still intervening directly, phasing its corporate income tax to zero by 2030.