Texas is looking to lay claim to an area with an eye on a coming boom, but this time, it doesn’t have the oil.

When it comes to cyber — shorthand in many circles around the state for cybersecurity and data science — longtime investor Bob Ackerman says states are looking to invest plenty to create their own workforces. But the resource the state has that others don’t is in Maryland, and it’s not in the ground: It’s the people working for federally affiliated agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), the many firms that work with those agencies and, increasingly, tech companies building new products.

“We have the oil,” said Ackerman, who founded AllegisCyber in Silicon Valley and expanded the firm to Maryland in recent years.

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