Inbound investment and outbound expansion are climbing together, not trading off.
By Jason Kumpf, International Advisor · September 14, 2026
Global commerce is no longer a one-way channel. For decades the story of cross-border business was framed as outbound: American companies opening offices in London, Singapore or Sao Paulo to chase new customers. That story still holds, but a second current has grown just as strong. Capital, technology and services are now flowing into the United States at a pace that rivals what flows out, and the two movements are reinforcing each other rather than competing.
The numbers make the shift concrete. Foreign investors spent 232.2 billion dollars in 2025 acquiring, establishing or expanding businesses in the United States, an increase of 76.8 billion dollars, or 49.5 percent, from the year before, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. That capital was tied to businesses that created more than 213,000 jobs. Manufacturing captured the largest share at 121.8 billion dollars, and California, Texas and Pennsylvania led the states that received the investment.
Separate data from UN Trade and Development on new greenfield projects, meaning ground-up facilities rather than acquisitions, put US-bound announcements at 237 billion dollars in the first half of 2025 alone. More than half of that total sat in AI-adjacent sectors, with 103 billion dollars in semiconductors and 27 billion dollars in data centers. Foreign companies are not simply buying into the American market. They are building the physical and digital infrastructure that AI, biotech and advanced manufacturing depend on, and they are building it inside US borders.
Meanwhile the outbound side of the ledger is expanding through a different channel: services. Global trade reached 33 trillion dollars in 2024, and services accounted for nearly 60 percent of that year's growth, expanding 9 percent and adding 700 billion dollars in value, according to UN Trade and Development. Goods trade grew a comparatively modest 2 percent. Software licensing, cloud platforms, professional services and biotech research collaboration travel across borders without a container ship, and American companies in tech, finance and life sciences sit among the primary beneficiaries of that shift. A company that once needed a warehouse in Rotterdam to sell into Europe can now sell a subscription from Austin.
This is the real definition of a two-way trade boom. It is not that investment happens to flow in both directions. It is that the same forces, AI infrastructure build-out, digital services delivery and diversified supply chains, are pulling money and expertise across the border in both directions at once. A biotech firm licensing its platform to a partner in Basel and a German manufacturer opening a plant in Ohio are participating in the same underlying trend.
For companies weighing market entry, the calculus has changed in both directions. A US technology company evaluating entry into a European or Asian market now has more services-trade infrastructure, payment rails and legal precedent to work with than it did five years ago, built to carry the record volumes that global trade data now confirm. A German, Japanese or Canadian company evaluating US entry sees a market where that 49.5 percent jump in new FDI expenditure signals active interest from regulators, states and capital markets alike. Japan alone contributed 50.5 billion dollars of the 2025 total, followed by Germany at 26.7 billion dollars and Canada at 23.5 billion dollars, three economies with long records of successful US market entry.
Sector matters as much as direction. Tech and AI infrastructure are pulling inbound capital because chip fabrication, data centers and cloud buildout increasingly locate closest to end customers and power supply, which for many global firms means the United States. Biotech is pulling in both directions at once, with US clinical and research capability drawing inbound partnerships while American therapeutics and diagnostics companies expand into European and Asian regulatory markets to reach patients faster. Real estate tied to this build-out, from data center campuses to advanced manufacturing sites, tends to follow the capital in whichever direction it moves.
None of this requires a company to choose one direction and commit to it permanently. The organizations capturing the most value right now treat market entry as a two-way capability, equally ready to bring outside capital and partners into the United States as they are to take a US product or platform abroad. The data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and UN Trade and Development point the same way. Cross-border business in 2026 is not an export function bolted onto a domestic company. It is a standing capability that runs in both directions, and the sectors leading the boom, AI infrastructure, biotech and technology services, are exactly the ones where that two-way fluency pays off fastest.
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