On vacation this summer, Didi Caldwell went hiking with her husband and mother in a northern Michigan nature preserve. They’d already spotted a deer, a swan and a black squirrel when she crested some dunes and saw something exciting. “Wow, look at that,” Caldwell told them. “That’s so awesome.” Shimmering across a couple miles of Lake Michigan was a 1,000-acre cement plant.
Grimy, unsightly facilities are Caldwell’s life’s work. For 26 years, she has specialized in the niche art of site selection. In the global race for capital and cutting-edge technology, Caldwell is something like a referee, helping to decide where in the world to put a big factory, data center or chemical plant. Caldwell and her 16-year-old firm, Global Location Strategies, or GLS, specialize in big industrial projects and have guided at least $44 billion in investments that generated more than 15,000 jobs around the world. Her client roster is confidential, but projects include facilities for automotive manufacturing, life sciences, semiconductor production, data centers and all manner of energy generation.
Recent events have revolutionized the job, and Caldwell, 56, is busier than ever. “I spent the first half of my career moving companies out of the United States, and I spent the second half moving them back in,” she says in an interview. Last year, she helped find a spot for a $1.3 billion lithium processing facility in South Carolina. In 2022, she guided the placement of a $916 million battery component factory in Ohio, the same year she found a place for a $4.1 billion aluminum rolling and recycling plant in Alabama.
The daughter of a US Army helicopter pilot, Caldwell spent her early childhood on military bases before her family settled down in South Carolina. She earned a degree in architecture at Clemson University and then traveled the world. At 29, while studying for an international masters of business administration, she visited a nylon plant in Colombia, which she described as, “dirty and noisy and fabulous.” She was fascinated to learn that this was what it took for her to wear pantyhose. “I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” she says. “The world just opened up to me at that moment.”
The next semester, in Argentina, she met her first site selection consultant, a man named Ed McCallum who was studying the feasibility of a copper smelter. He was working for Fluor Daniel, the construction company now known as Fluor. She begged him for a job, which landed her back in Greenville, South Carolina, where her grandparents had lived. “I thought it was a sleepy little town that I just had absolutely no interest in staying in,” she says. But Caldwell would grow to love the city, which was being transformed by a BMW plant that opened in the 1990s. She started her own firm in 2008.
Siting Is in the Details
The job is a blend of data-crunching, on-the-ground investigation and hard-nose negotiating. Caldwell figures there are around 850 distinct data points that can sway a siting decision. Transportation, housing, quality of life, cost of living, utility rates — it’s all relevant, as are the nitty-gritty details of the site itself — its size, shape and location, and what’s in the water, soil and natural habitats.
Caldwell and her staff of 17 are constantly hunting for a site’s “fatal flaw.” How hard is it to get permits from various layers of local government? How much electricity, sewer, water and natural gas can be piped into a site? What’s the local labor force like now, and how might it look in 20 years when the facility will presumably still be operating? Is the region a place you’d actually want to be, where your most valuable employees would be willing to relocate?
Each visit to a potential site is an all-day marathon of meetings on crucial details from utility connections and transportation logistics to construction and labor costs — plus chats with a succession of officials at various levels of government.
The process requires an expertise that’s “an inch deep and a mile wide,” Caldwell says. “Some things you only learn by doing them over and over.” A site selection’s final stretch involves negotiating financial packages with states and localities competing to attract an industrial project. Despite months of analysis, a decision can often come down to subjective criteria. “I have seen clients go against the data because they liked the place better,” she says.
Shortly after her hike in northern Michigan, Caldwell and two employees drove up to Greensboro, North Carolina. Nowhere more dramatically demonstrates the size and scale of the US’s recent industrial turnabout. Decades of globalization devastated the North Carolina economy as textile plants and furniture factories fled overseas. Now in their place are complex projects relying on advanced technologies and skilled workers. The Greensboro airport, for example, is home to a growing aviation-focused industrial park. By far the largest local economic development victory is a $14 billion, 5,000-employee Toyota battery plant under construction 20 miles outside Greensboro.
Local leaders’ aggressive recruiting of industry has been spurred by funding from Duke Energy Corp., a utility eager for new power customers. GLS was hired to evaluate 500 acres of forest and farmland four miles from downtown Greensboro. On paper, the site had potential: At the intersection of two interstate highways, 90 minutes from Charlotte in one direction and Raleigh-Durham in the other, the property could put a client within reach of more than half of the US population within 11 hours, the usual legal daily limit for a semi-trailer truck driver. Chamber of Commerce employees pointed to Greensboro’s low cost of living and cheap housing, its amenities including sports teams and a new performing arts center, as well as the region’s good roads, short commutes and scarce traffic. Job training and apprenticeship programs were available, and minutes from the site is North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, or A&T, the US’s largest historically Black college.Caldwell takes a “windshield tour” of a potential site in Greensboro.Photographer: Kate Medley for Bloomberg
But as Caldwell and her employees asked questions, the site’s drawbacks became clearer. Though the spot was infrastructure-rich — bisected by sewer, water and high-capacity power lines, along a railroad, minutes from highways — connecting to some of those assets could require years-long upgrades. A site visit revealed no obvious environmental issues, but no one had yet spent the money to seriously study the land or what might be buried underneath it.
Caldwell’s biggest worry was the configuration of the property. One family was willing to sell off the 500 acres that they’d owned for a century, but the parcels weren’t all contiguous. The owners of the other slices of land might be willing to sell, but no deals had been reached. “A lot of sites start like this,” Caldwell said on the way back to her hotel, “and it can take 10 years to get it where it needs to be to get a great project.”
China Isn’t Always Cheaper
Later that evening, Caldwell explained her view of the global competitive landscape to 20 local economic development officials dining on steak and salmon. “What I hear all the time is how much cheaper China is than the US. It’s not,” she said, showing them a PowerPoint slide ranking more than 30 countries on their estimated operating costs including labor, electricity, water and transportation. The US landed in the middle, only slightly more expensive than China.
Early in Caldwell’s career, China was the “land of opportunity,” she says, with the cost of labor, land and most other things so low that it was a no-brainer, well worth the drawbacks of locating valuable assets in a one-party state on the other side of the world. Europe was also hot around the turn of the century, amid excitement for the adoption of the euro and the expansion of the eurozone. The US was an industrial backwater, barely considered for most projects.
Now, Europe and China face the same headwinds — aging populations set to shrink workforces and consumer demand. It’s also now clear, Caldwell says, that “business leaders were lulled into a sense of complacency” when it came to the risks of extending supply chains across the globe. Russia’s war on Ukraine spiked Europe’s energy costs, while Covid and tariff wars reminded CEOs of the advantages of placing production near customers.
The US, meanwhile, offers a growing population thanks to immigration, and cheap energy thanks to fracking. It’s also next to Mexico, now cheaper for labor-intensive projects than China and home to many young consumers eager to join the middle class.
President Joe Biden inherited these geographic and demographic advantages four years ago and then set about adding more spurs to industrial development: first an infrastructure law, then an act to incentivize semiconductor manufacturing and finally the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which pours hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy and climate change-fighting technologies. “The IRA just threw fuel on the fire,” Caldwell says.
In three years, US manufacturing construction spending has tripled, hitting records even as other economic signals have cooled. So many prime industrial properties have been taken that one of Caldwell’s main challenges is finding suitable sites, especially in popular destinations across the sunbelt. Another is finding enough electrical power for projects like data centers and battery plants.
“The manufacturing renaissance in the US has only just begun,” Caldwell said, assuring her audience that Greensboro and North Carolina had many of the same geographic and demographic advantages as the nation as a whole. Not that there aren’t risks in this boom period: Many industrial sites have been reserved by companies with cutting-edge technologies that might never work out technically or economically. The US regulatory environment is generally more lax than in Europe, but industrial projects face more opposition from neighboring residents.
The US is not the only option, of course. For energy-intensive projects, “there’s nowhere cheaper to manufacture than the US,” Caldwell said, but for labor-intensive ones, clients are looking to Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Caldwell is starting to see more potential in Argentina, which, despite decades of financial dysfunction, offers an educated workforce and relatively well-off consumers, along with super-low costs.
Not all is lost in Europe: France’s demographics are more favorable than the rest of the continent, and its economy isn’t as dependent as Germany on exports to China’s flagging economy. In a more unstable world, US allies like the UK and Japan may have advantages. So could Turkey, sitting at a strategic place on the globe between Europe, Asia and the Middle East and Africa.
Wrapping up her talk, Caldwell urged her audience to consider what kind of industry Greensboro actually wants to attract — and what they’re happy to see go elsewhere. “You shouldn’t say ‘yes’ to everything,” she said. “You only have so much land. You want to get the most out of it.”
