SAN ANTONIO – While companies and producers all across the world shut down and slow their business due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Port San Antonio is looking to the future and working on big projects, ranging from new construction to new schools to new innovation.
“A couple of employers as you can imagine have been slowed down because of the pandemic, but this is over a five billion a year economic impact on San Antonio. The 14,000 people who work on this campus, most of the people are still here, trying to find a way to keep going,” Port SA CEO and President Jim Perschbach said.
There is a new school set to be built on the Port San Antonio campus, and a new building set to house various companies called Tech Two.
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“We call it Tech Two -- and it’s another building that is critical infrastructure for our nation; whether that’s protecting our electrical grid, or whether it’s protecting computer networks, or whether it’s protecting healthcare information,” Perschbach said.
An innovation and entertainment building in Port San Antonio is also scheduled to be completed in about a year.
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"We have two aspects of esports in there, it’s gonna be a 24-hour gaming facility. We can go in there, you can play with whatever you want, you can even work on your system. You can build systems, you can work on the software and then we’re gonna have a place where we can host competitions,” Perschbach said.
COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new virus, stands for coronavirus disease 2019. The disease first appeared in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, but spread around the world in early 2020, causing the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic in March. The first case confirmed in the U.S. was in mid-January and the first case confirmed in San Antonio was in mid-February.
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