The company was recruited to Buffalo as part of Invest Buffalo Niagara's aggressive outreach to Canadian companies in recent years, and was courted by state and local officials in a bid to capture both jobs and dollars in a high-tech target industry. But those talks are not yet completed, Gellman and others noted.

“There’s still a lot to do,” said Thomas Kucharski, CEO of Invest Buffalo Niagara, the economic development organization. “It doesn’t mean they’ve selected Western New York, that they have a site, that they’re purchasing or leasing anything. It just means there’s an allocation of power if they decide to locate somewhere in Western New York.”

In fact, the Buffalo Urban Development Corp. – which owns the industrial park where the company plans to locate – held a confidential executive session discussion about the project for its board members on Wednesday, but the board wasn't in a position to take any public action because there was no sales contract yet, agency officials said at the time.

"We're doing a formal announcement later this month, but when NYPA released this today, it advanced it," Gellman said Thursday evening. "The [job] numbers that are being presented are preliminary numbers to get the ball rolling. They will change once we have numbers from all entities."