Two headlines, two very different conclusions. One reads, “Manufacturing Roaring Back,” the other, “U.S. Manufacturing Renaissance Missing in Action.”
So, which is it? Is U.S. manufacturing momentum rhetoric or reality?
That’s the question Greg Healey, executive vice president, head of industrial services in North America for Savills, and Mark Russo, vice president of industrial research for Savills, explored with attendees at I.CON East this week in Jersey City, New Jersey.
“We are, in fact, in a boom in terms of building new manufacturing plants,” Russo said, “and these are expensive advanced manufacturing plants, running 57% above the 10-year average.”
At the same time, he said, several metrics suggest that the U.S. is not growing its industrial production in terms of output.
Why is that? One answer is that there is a timeline factor at play.
Savills tracks not just announcements of new manufacturing projects but also whether those projects make it to completion. Do they get revised up or revised down, put on hold indefinitely or canceled outright?
Russo said that of the manufacturing investments announced in the past five years, only one-third have made it to completion and started production thus far. “That includes EV battery plants, chip plants that were big announcements four years ago.”
Another factor is that it’s very expensive to build advanced manufacturing facilities. “So maybe we’re producing some expensive smaller items like chips, EV batteries, but we’re not by and large producing a lot of consumer goods. That’s part of what’s underpinning those mixed headlines” about manufacturing’s performance.
In tracking stalled manufacturing projects, Savills has noted an above-historical-average amount of projects being canceled or put on hold, although data has been heading in the right direction over the past 18 months. Russo noted that another metric Savills uses, called a stall rate, got as high as 70% in late 2024. “What this means is that for every 10 new manufacturing jobs that were being announced, seven were put on hold,” he explained. “That is coming down very significantly and thankfully moving in the right direction. But this has become an important indicator.”
Russo said there is interesting data to show what underpins companies’ decisions to grow their domestic manufacturing footprints (reshoring). The top factors have remained the same for the past 10 years: government incentives, proximity either to customers or part of a manufacturing ecosystem, and a skilled workforce. In 2025, tariffs were cited as a factor more frequently than any other time going back through 15 years of data, but it was still only 10th on the list. Russo said having a sustained policy on tariffs could cause that factor to rise in importance in future years.
As for tariffs’ wider impact, Russo pointed to an analysis suggesting they are an overall net positive over the long term on manufacturing output in the economy. But it’s a bit of a mixed bag too. “The traditional manufacturing sectors stand to gain the most, at least from the most recent iteration of this policy. But the advanced industries stand to be hurt by it. Why is that? It’s about the complexity of the manufacturing process, about the critical inputs, that are often imported.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act also poses pluses and minuses for manufacturing. Rules around 100% rapid depreciation creates some incentive to invest in manufacturing production facilities, and increased defense spending has been underpinning growth in aerospace and defense manufacturing activity. “But it has definitely been a setback for the clean tech supply chain,” Russo said.
Geopolitical risk is also driving the aerospace and defense sectors, with venture capital funding running 300% above the five-year norm. In addition, 40% of new manufacturing announcements over the past year were in aerospace and defense.
The second largest bucket for manufacturing announcements involves AI and energy infrastructure. “These are manufacturing projects related to the build-out of data centers,” Russo said. “Anything from data center hardware to infrastructure needed to supply electricity to expand the power grid.”
“Life sciences is also an emerging area of manufacturing, with tariffs impacting that, as well as the growth of new drugs like GLP-1.”
Russo said that more than 50% of manufacturing projects over the past five years have been awarded to five states: North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Tennessee and South Carolina.
“Those are places that are winning on a number of factors,” Russo said. “They have land. They have land at the right price. They have the right labor pool. They have the labor pool at the right price. They have the infrastructure, and they have an existing manufacturing base that could provide some synergies. And last but not least, they really have the state and local governments that are pro-business, that are providing robust incentives.”
This post is brought to you by JLL, the social media and conference blog sponsor of NAIOP’s I.CON East 2026. Learn more about JLL at www.us.jll.com or www.jll.ca.
