Kind: Measured report
By Asif Hussain, Founder and CEO, SpecIndex
Every mega-fab groundbreaking gets a press release. What is harder to see is the rest of the pipeline underneath it. That pipeline includes the mid-size plant expansions, the packaging lines, and the pharma fill-finish buildouts that never make a wire story but still pull a permit.
SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records shows 1,853 manufacturing and factory construction projects opened or announced since January 1, 2025, worth a combined $9.1 billion in disclosed estimated value. That is not a semiconductor-fab count. It is the broader base of the reshoring story: food, pharma, metals, batteries, and industrial equipment plants going up across 15 states with enough volume to register.
Facts at a glance
- SpecIndex's own database of public bid and permit records shows 1,853 manufacturing and factory construction projects opened or announced since January 1, 2025, worth a combined $9.1 billion in disclosed estimated value. (From: the opening paragraph.)
- On October 16, 2026, we ran `find_brand_positions` for Valmet with a limit of 20 and for E80 with a limit of 20 through the SpecIndex MCP. (From: Method note and scope.)
- Each query returned 0 rows and a total count of 0, across 322,370 documents searched and 62,117 projects with documents in the coverage returned that day. (From: Method note and scope.)
- All figures in this article are retained from the original September 2026 count. (From: Method note and scope.)
Texas leads on count and Georgia leads on dollars
By project count, the pipeline is not concentrated in the states named in reshoring coverage. Texas leads with 400 projects (a combined $575 million in disclosed value), followed by Florida (347 projects, $250 million) and New York (315 projects, $250 million). California, Illinois, Ohio and Arizona each show lower counts but still real volume: 148, 130, 94 and 93 projects respectively.
Dollar value flips the ranking. Georgia shows only 45 manufacturing projects in the same window, but $4.06 billion in disclosed estimated value. That is more than four times Texas's total despite a tenth of the count.
North Carolina shows a similar pattern: 75 projects, $1.48 billion. Both states are being driven by a small number of very large single projects rather than broad-based volume.
| State | Projects (2025-01-01 to present) | Disclosed value |
|---|---|---|
| Texas | 400 | $575M |
| Florida | 347 | $250M |
| New York | 315 | $250M |
| California | 148 | $163M |
| Illinois | 130 | $74M |
| Georgia | 45 | $4.06B |
| North Carolina | 75 | $1.48B |
Download CSV (the rows above, exactly as shown)
*Source: SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records, `description`/`name` matched on manufacturing, factory and industrial-plant language, `opened_or_announced_date >= 2025-01-01`.*
Anchor projects set the dollar totals in Georgia and North Carolina
Two projects in the corpus explain most of the Georgia and North Carolina dollar totals. AbbVie's pharmaceutical manufacturing campus in Durham, North Carolina, carries a disclosed value of $1.4 billion on its own.
That is roughly all of that state's manufacturing total. Sofidel's Port of Inola plant expansion in Oklahoma, at $775 million, and Ferrara Candy Company's South Carolina manufacturing plant, at $675 million, round out the largest disclosed single projects in the window.
This is the shape reshoring construction actually takes in the data: a handful of nine- and ten-figure anchor projects concentrated in a few states, sitting on top of a much wider, thinner base of smaller plant work spread across dozens of metro areas. A state-level ranking by dollars alone will overweight wherever the next anchor project happens to land; a ranking by count is the better read on how broad the underlying activity actually is.
The broad base matters more than the headline projects
The Reshoring Initiative's own 2024 data report put reshoring and foreign-direct-investment job announcements at roughly 244,000 for the year, down from 2022's peak but still multiples of the pre-2021 run rate. That pattern is consistent with a base of construction activity wide enough to spread across 15+ states rather than concentrated in one or two flagship regions. Census Bureau manufacturing construction spending data shows a similar multi-year plateau at an elevated level rather than a single-project spike.
What that means for anyone selling into these projects: the anchor projects get bid out first and get covered by trade press, but they also draw the most competition. The broader base is the 300-plus projects each in Texas, Florida and New York that never clear $10 million individually.
That base is where a specification, once written into a Division 11 (equipment) or Division 41 (material processing and handling equipment) section on one plant, tends to get reused as the starting template for the next one at the same engineering firm. That is the mechanism SpecIndex's own basis-of-design tracking is built to catch, and it is where sustained manufacturer visibility gets built, not just on the projects that make the news.
A project record can name vendors, and that is the layer worth reading
Where a manufacturing project's documents are available, SpecIndex's brand position extraction is built to show which manufacturers are named inside a project, and whether a name sits as basis of design or as one line in an approved-equal list. That is the layer generic industry reporting does not reach.
The question is not only that a plant is being built in Oklahoma. The question is which manufacturer's line is specified inside it.
No document or page citation for a vendor on the Sofidel plant is stated in this article. The vendor claim in the original text has been softened to the general corpus record above, for the reason given in the method note.
Method note and scope
We counted manufacturing and factory projects in SpecIndex's own corpus of public bid and permit records. The match rule is manufacturing, factory and industrial-plant language matched in a project's `description` or `name`, as the source line under the table states. The date field is `opened_or_announced_date`, and the window is January 1, 2025 onward.
All figures in this article are retained from the original September 2026 count. That includes the 1,853 projects, the $9.1 billion combined disclosed value, the Texas count of 400 projects against the Georgia total of $4.06 billion on 45 projects, and the named anchor projects AbbVie at $1.4 billion, Sofidel at $775 million, and Ferrara Candy Company at $675 million. The corpus keeps growing, so the figures are dated and will not match a live count run later.
On October 16, 2026, we ran `find_brand_positions` for Valmet with a limit of 20 and for E80 with a limit of 20 through the SpecIndex MCP. Each query returned 0 rows and a total count of 0, across 322,370 documents searched and 62,117 projects with documents in the coverage returned that day.
No row on the Sofidel project was returned for Valmet. The original document claim for Valmet and E80 on the Sofidel plant is therefore not cited in the text above.