When Mark Kvamme, a former partner at Sequoia Capital, left Silicon Valley for Columbus, Ohio, in 2011, colleagues told him that he was making a career-ending mistake.<\/p>\n
\u201cOhio is where venture capitalists go to die,\u201d he recalled one of them saying.<\/p>\n
Fifteen years later, Columbus, the state capital known as the headquarters for insurance companies and retail brands like Victoria\u2019s Secret, has been transformed. The metropolitan area has become a critical hub for advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
\u201cColumbus is booming,\u201d said Dennis DeMeyere, a former technical director at Google Cloud, who plans to open an A.I.-powered manufacturing company, Autonomous Production, near Columbus. \u201cIt\u2019s wild. Everything is under construction. It feels like the Bay Area felt 13 or 14 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the most ambitious tech projects in the United States are rising from the farmlands outside the city. Mark Zuckerberg recently stopped by to check on the development of a Meta facility that will train advanced artificial intelligence models. Intel is constructing a $28 billion fabrication facility that will build some of its most advanced chips.<\/p>\n
Palmer Luckey, the founder of the defense tech start-up Anduril, said he planned to buy a house here, to be close to the company\u2019s $1 billion factory that will build autonomous drones for the U.S. military.<\/p>\n
Not everyone is thrilled. Some residents have complained that the proliferation of high-tech facilities is a result of public subsidies for big tech companies. Others said they worried that the new facilities \u2014 which are highly automated \u2014 wouldn\u2019t employ enough people to improve life for longtime residents.<\/p>\n
Manufacturing employment nationwide remained relatively flat in recent years. Employers added 7,000 manufacturing jobs last month, according to the Labor Department. But the picture is different in central Ohio. Job growth in the manufacturing sector here rose 4.4 percent between 2021 and 2024, up from 2.7 percent in the four-year period before the pandemic, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution\u2019s metropolitan policy program.<\/p>\n
The Columbus metro area ranks 46th out of 100 metro areas for manufacturing job growth, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings program. <\/p>\n
Federal investment \u2014 most notably the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act \u2014 has helped propel construction in the Columbus area by providing billions in subsidies for domestic semiconductor production, Mr. Muro said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a short period the Columbus metro has climbed substantially,\u201d he said, adding that the region previously ranked 70th.<\/p>\n
From Cleveland to Columbus<\/p>\n
In a 200,000-square-foot factory on the west side of Columbus, Andy Lonsberry, chief executive of Path Robotics, demonstrated an autonomous robotic dog with a welding torch for a head. Using sensors invented by Path, the robot was able to identify the seam on a metal wall that it was supposed to weld. It aimed its torch, and sent sparks flying.<\/p>\n
Path Robotics has raised $370 million from investors since 2018, and entered into a partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries, the military shipbuilder, to tackle a shortage of welders, often a bottleneck in American manufacturing.<\/p>\n
Mr. Lonsberry started Path with his brother Alex in Cleveland, where they both earned doctorates at Case Western Reserve University. They moved the company to Columbus in 2019 because of the fast-growing tech scene, the local incentives and the technical talent coming out of Ohio State University. The company employs 175 people, but plans to employ a total of 300 people by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is wildly valuable, to be able to coalesce a group in Columbus,\u201d Mr. Lonsberry said.<\/p>\n
The changes unfolding here are cultural as well as economic. An eclectic restaurant scene has sprung up in a city that was the home of the first Wendy\u2019s restaurant. A $2 billion airport terminal is being built to secure more direct international flights for business travelers.<\/p>\n
The Columbus metro area, home to more than 2.2 million people, grew by 21,312 people between 2024 and 2025, according to census data.<\/p>\n
Connect Housing Blocks, one of the largest manufacturers of modular homes in the country, is helping to house the newcomers. At its factory in the Columbus neighborhood of South Linden, a worker fed a ribbon of light-gauge steel into a machine that bent it and drilled it, creating a metal stud to frame a wall. On the assembly line, the walls became rooms, and rooms became sleek apartments, which waited to be trucked to a site and stacked like Legos.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s founder, Brad DeHays, a real estate developer, began building housing this way when it became too difficult to hire skilled tradesmen. Apartments built in the factory cost about $90,000 less per unit than those constructed in the traditional way, Mr. DeHays said.<\/p>\n
The Drive for Funding<\/p>\n
Mr. Kvamme (pronounced KWA-me), the former Sequoia Capital partner, evangelizes about Ohio with the zealousness of a convert. He was asked to lead economic development for state by John Kasich, the Republican governor at the time, in 2011. He intended to stay for only six months, but became enamored with manufacturing when he began touring factories around the state.<\/p>\n