If you’re searching for a symbol of the wild ride the US economy has been on over the past decade and where it’s going next, the former General Motors Co. plant in Lordstown, Ohio, checks a lot of boxes. President Donald Trump held a rally in nearby Youngstown in July 2017 at which he told the crowd, “Don’t sell your house,” because “we’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand-new ones.” GM shuttered the facility less than two years later, and then a startup moved in, planning to make electric cars, only for it to go bankrupt by 2023. Now some of the biggest names in tech—Foxconn, OpenAI and SoftBank—have hatched a plan to repurpose the 6.2 million-square-foot facility into a manufacturing hub for artificial intelligence equipment. A demonstration data center will also be built on the site.
The AI boom is coming to America’s industrial heartland, which speaks to how the economy is being transformed—even propped up—by a surge in investment in software, chipmaking and data centers. But the Lordstown plant’s reinvention raises the question: Is the exuberance around the technology that Trump has enthusiastically endorsed getting in the way of his goal of making America great again at churning out things like gasoline-powered cars, steel and furniture? Access to capital, power and people is key to the success of any construction or manufacturing project—and right now AI is gobbling up all three.