Where FDI Drives the Bus

Since the late 1980s, the global corporate facility projects database maintained and populated by Conway Data has tracked project locations and expansions by companies of every stripe in every U.S. state. But only within the past decade did we add to our columns of data a category tracking investing companies by country of ultimate beneficial owner.

Now that a critical mass of projects has been tracked, this fall we analyzed the 1,686 U.S. projects we’ve tracked since 2015 that have had at least a share of involvement by a foreign-based firm (i.e. joint ventures count). The Top 10s below represent the highest-ranking states and metros based on an index that awards points according to the territories’ ranking by number of projects involving foreign-based corporate end-user investors, total project-related capex and total project-related job creation.

The projects themselves display the power of FDI attraction for any territory’s economic development playbook.

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