Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill shakes up Eastern NC solar site with China ties
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Pieces are shifting and new questions are arising around a major jobs project in Eastern North Carolina.
In April 2024, the state awarded Vietnam-based Boviet Solar an incentive to build a 908-worker manufacturing campus in the city of Greenville. Boviet opened a solar panel factory there the following year, which currently supports more than 300 employees.
Here’s where things get complicated. Though based in Vietnam, Boviet Solar was owned by a Chinese company called Boway Alloy. And on April 13, Boway agreed to sell its North Carolina solar panel plant to the Indian company Inox for roughly $254 million.
Why is Boway selling? In a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the company pointed to the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Signed in July 2025, this law added new restrictions on businesses linked to Foreign Entities of Concern, or FEOC, a concept that covers four nations: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. The Biden-era infrastructure bill actually defined FEOC first, but the Big Beautiful Bill went further by preventing FEOC-affiliated companies from getting clean energy tax credits.
Boway said it is offloading this North Carolina factory as a direct result.
This still leaves a second Greenville solar factory under Boway. In addition to the solar panel plant it just sold to Inox, the Chinese company (through Boviet) also built a large solar cell facility in the city, which it planned to launch later this year. Now, this incoming facility is on the market, too, Boway told Chinese regulators.
Will Inox purchase that site, too? And what does this all mean for the 908 promised jobs? For starters, the $8.3 million economic grant North Carolina awarded Boviet doesn’t automatically transfer to the new owner. Boviet (under Inox ownership) would have to request it, which N.C. Department of Commerce spokesperson Patrice Bethea says hasn’t happened yet.
Nor have Inox representatives contacted the Pitt County government, local economic development director Kelly Andrews told me. Andrews did say she didn’t expect the ownership change to alter the overall hiring trajectory at the site. This is also all pretty recent.
Under new ownership, Boviet Solar says it awaits more information about both Greenville solar sites. “At this stage, we expect to learn more details once the official announcement is released,” company spokesperson Songül Atacan wrote in an email. “Based on those details, there may also be implications for the PV cell manufacturing business in addition to the PV module operations.”
In a separate message to The N&O, an Inox spokesperson said the company will detail its North Carolina plans “very soon.”
Most major projects North Carolina backs with performance-based, taxpayer-funded incentives fall short, as any regular Open Source reader may know. State officials argue that’s a feature more than a bug. Life and geopolitics are difficult to predict. A CEO can suddenly die and trade tensions with China may rapidly escalate — both of which happened to the Chinese tire maker Triangle Tyre, which promised to bring 800 jobs to rural Edgecombe County. That project collapsed in 2022.
Boviet already having several hundred local jobs, a factory and a second on the way — all within two years — is better than what many incentive recipients achieve. But geopolitics has entered the picture. We’ll see what comes next.
Meta lobbies to ‘tweak’ North Carolina youth social media ban
North Carolina, like a growing number of states, is considering a social media ban for children. A bill working its way through the state Senate (having already overwhelmingly passed in the House last year) would prohibit kids under 14 from accessing these platforms. Those ages 14 and 15 would need parental consent.
This law could face freedom of speech challenges from Big Tech. The industry trade association NetChoice, which counts Amazon, Google and TikTok as members, has filed lawsuits over similar bills in multiple other states. “While NetChoice shares the goal of keeping children safe online, we strongly oppose state-mandated age restrictions because they are fundamentally unconstitutional and jeopardize the privacy of all citizens,” the organization’s vice president of government affairs Amy Bos wrote in an emailed statement.
But one NetChoice member is lobbying North Carolina lawmakers in support of the social media ban. Or at least, to adjust the bill’s language so the responsibility for verifying age is put on app store operators like Google and Apple and not on the individual social media platforms. That company is Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
“I met with (Meta) yesterday,” Rep. Jeff Zenger, the bill’s sponsor, said during an April 29 Senate education committee meeting. “There’s going to be a little minor tweak that has to do with the app stores.”
The bill as currently written still puts age verification responsibilities on social media platforms. For now.
Zenger, a Republican from Lewisville in Forsyth County, discussed this enforcement tweak in a phone interview this week. “The best part about the argument is you can have 100,000 apps and social media and all this kind of stuff that have to do (age verification), or you can have it all to the app store,” he said. “And so from a logistic standpoint, it’s better.”
In March, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating a law intended to protect children from online predators. A few days later, a Los Angeles jury found the company was negligent in a youth social media addiction lawsuit. If bans do survive legal opposition, then Meta at least wants all the major sector players to follow the same rules, according to Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, a think tank advocating for social media age verification rules.
“I think Meta more or less sees the app store issue as like a market equalizer,” he said. “I think they see the writing on the wall. Like they’re getting regulated, whether they like it or not.”
Clearing my cache
- Duke Energy is poised to combine its two North Carolina electric utilities after the state approved the merging of Duke Energy Progress and Duke Energy Carolinas last week. I spoke to a Duke University policy director on what ratepayers/regulators stand to gain and lose.
- The world’s most valuable company (Nvidia) and a major fiber optics manufacturer (Corning) are partnering to build at least one new plant in North Carolina (location, TBD). Nvidia has a long corporate history in Durham, while Corning has several existing factories statewide.
- Durham passed a 60-day data center moratorium, which one local leader called a “first step.”
- Swiss drugmaker Novartis picked a Morrisville campus to cap off its recent flurry of U.S. investments.
- Wolfspeed led with data center growth in its latest earnings release as the Durham chipmaker aims to pivot (once again) toward a higher-growth sector. Eight months post-bankruptcy, the company is enjoying some stock market success as investors appear encouraged by Wolfspeed’s book-balancing efforts.
- This newsletter hasn’t mentioned MrBeast for a few weeks, which I’m legally obligated to remedy. The North Carolina YouTuber is scheduled to live film a video at East Carolina University’s football stadium on May 24, with thousands expected to attend.
- WakeMed leaders acknowledge they need to sell the public on their proposed merger with Charlotte-based Atrium Health. Their pitching has begun as Wake County commissioners delayed an approval decision.
National Tech Happenings
- The last Spirit Airlines flight touched down in Dallas early Saturday morning.
- iPhone owners could see a minor payday, potentially up to $95 per device, after Apple settled a false advertising lawsuit over Siri’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
- The numbers AI platforms throw out there are absurd. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said this week his company could grow 80 times this year alone.
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This story was originally published May 8, 2026 at 10:56 AM.
