McKinsey chairs: Building a more resilient industrial base may require $2 trillion in investment

U.S. factories could replace half the trade deficit just by running harder. Closing the gap on semiconductors and other critical goods is a much bigger lift.

As the United States approaches its 250^th anniversary, intensifying technological competition and geopolitical risks have resurfaced a decades-old question with renewed urgency: Should the United States rebuild its industrial base?

The United States imports about $3 trillion in manufactured goods each year. A meaningful share is tied to products that face at least one of three trade dependencies that expose imports to vulnerabilities: criticality to national security; concentration among a few suppliers; or sourced from geopolitically distant partners. One-quarter are exposed to at least two of those dependencies. Five percent, including computers, electronic products, and key materials like rare-earth magnets, are exposed to all three.

Economic and national security are increasingly intertwined. Still, for cost and efficiency reasons it doesn’t always make business sense to produce things at home. Countries trade with each other for good reasons.

To quantify what’s possible for US manufacturing to make more at home, we created a “ramp-up factor.” It gauges how much domestic production would need to increase in order to produce what’s currently imported. We examined 5,000 products across almost 350 industries to assess how the need to ramp-up varies.

Factors below 1 suggest existing capacity can support enough extra production to replace imports. Some manufacturing stalwarts, like aircraft, fall in this camp. The output potential for such products adds up. Simply running factories at higher utilization could generate an additional $660 billion in output, equivalent to about half the trade deficit. (Of course, such an uptick in output would depend on US producers having a market for the additional supply.)

But this would make little dent on the most sensitive exposures for future-shaping products like semiconductors and data center servers that will drive tomorrow’s economy. For about half of these goods, US production capacity would need to quintuple or more. Growing production to the extent needed to eliminate the most critical trade exposures could require about $2 trillion in capacity-creating investment.

That challenge becomes even clearer in a global context. Productive investment is one of the best leading indicators of where future production, innovation, and jobs will ultimately land. China is now adding roughly $4.4 trillion in net productive assets annually—more than four times the US equivalent. At the same time, many of those new factories in industries ranging from semiconductors and batteries to pharmaceuticals are being built in China with lifetime production costs 30 to 50 percent lower than comparable facilities in advanced economies.

The size of the gap may seem daunting. But it’s not unprecedented. The United States has mobilized large amounts of capital before, for example, with the build out of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry or more recently in AI-connected capital projects. What made those transformations possible was a compelling business case aligned with national priorities. Funding may be the easy part: specialized skills, supporting infrastructure, sufficient energy, and ability to achieve competitive lifetime production costs are more important.

There has been some industrial ramp-up in sectors including electronics and aerospace over the past year, but so far not at a broad enough scale to reshape the factory sector. That distinction matters. While US investment in AI infrastructure has surged—data center investment has increased roughly 200 percent since late 2022—overall net productive investment as a share of GDP has barely moved. Outside the AI value chain, investment in productive assets that lead to future manufacturing jobs, production, and growth has remained largely flat. Foreign direct investment flows suggest new capacity is being created, most notably in semiconductors and batteries. But similarly, outside of FDI, overall investment has not yet seen a sustained boom.

Before massive amounts of capital are deployed and new plants built, manufacturers can act now. Even as they start ramping up, they can look for other ways to lower trade dependencies, for example, by reallocating sourcing to more trading partners. They can redesign supply chains to build resilience, and train workers for automation.

Emerging technologies like AI and advanced robotics are not optional in this scenario. Many of the factories that emerge from this technological transition will look very different from today’s. They may require fewer workers in some roles, more highly skilled workers in others, and entirely new operating models that blend digital and physical production.

The ramp-up transformation requires coordinated shifts across entire ecosystems and supply networks. Energy infrastructure, workforce development, permitting processes, and supply chain visibility all become critical enablers.

The United States has latent strength across each of these dimensions. It is still the world’s second-largest manufacturer, although its share of the global total has receded for several decades. Our research makes clear that rebuilding the industrial base would not mean recreating the past. Nostalgia for the days when manufacturing accounted for a quarter of the total workforce is understandable. But the economic realities have changed; that world is not coming back.

Instead, it would mean building something new—more automated, more technologically advanced, and with different skills. Unlocking these capabilities requires sustained effort. Companies that act early—by strengthening resilience, investing in capacity, sharpening worker skills, and rethinking supply chains—will be better positioned to capture demand as it shifts.

The question is not whether the United States can compete in manufacturing, but where and how it chooses to do so. The recent surge in AI investment demonstrates that America can still mobilize capital at extraordinary speed when a business case is compelling. The challenge will be to extend that momentum beyond data centers into the broader productive investments that will determine where manufacturing capacity, innovation, and economic growth are created over the coming decades.

The past 50 years have reshaped global manufacturing around cost and efficiency. The coming years will reshape it around resilience. For the United States, that shift is not a burden. It is an opportunity.

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