Ivan Barratt: Indiana is America’s most important state for capital now

Realtor.com just released its annual housing report card, and Indiana didn’t just pass. It earned the top spot. Only four states earned an A, and Indiana jumped to first place, scoring highest on the two metrics that matter most: affordability and supply growth. Homes here carry a median price of $295,810, just 28.3% of the state’s median household income, and new construction is keeping pace with population.

For anyone watching where capital is flowing in America, this is no surprise.

Re-industrialization is the defining capital trend of the decade, and Indiana keeps showing up at the center of its most consequential announcements. In 2024 alone, the state secured a record $39.2 billion in committed capital investment, up 37% from the year before, across 169 company commitments and more than 17,000 new jobs at an average wage near $75,000. Since the start of 2022, Indiana has booked more than $89 billion in committed capital. For a state often skipped over on the way from New York to California, those are not small numbers. They are the numbers of a place that has undeniably become essential.

Start with what Indiana does better than almost anywhere on earth: make medicine. Eli Lilly and Co. has committed more than $50 billion to U.S. manufacturing since 2020, and more than $21 billion of that is going into Indiana. Its LEAP district in Lebanon, a 600-acre complex northwest of the city, recently took an additional $4.5 billion and opened its first operating facility. This is the headquarters of a company at the center of the most important drug franchise in a generation reinvesting at scale in its home state. That kind of anchor tenant pulls suppliers, talent and capital in behind it for decades.

The AI buildout needs land and power — and Indiana has both. Amazon has now committed roughly $26 billion to data-center infrastructure in the state, including an $11 billion campus in New Carlisle and $15 billion more announced for northwest Indiana, making it the largest technology investor in Indiana history. Meta is adding $800 million in Jeffersonville. Statewide, announced data-center spending has climbed toward $14 billion and beyond. Each campus is a multi-decade demand signal for construction, services and, critically, housing in markets where supply is still tight.

Indiana is also building a credible semiconductor and microelectronics story. SkyWater Technology is developing a $1.8 billion fab in Purdue’s Discovery Park District, with MediaTek opening its first Midwest chip-design center alongside it. Tying it together is the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Crane and the Indiana-led “Silicon Crossroads” hub. It is one of the Defense Department’s Microelectronics Commons centers, with a five-year budget around $2 billion, positioning the state at the intersection of trusted microelectronics and national defense. In an era when chips and security are the same conversation, that is a rare and durable position.

Indiana’s momentum is amplified by everything happening around it. Intel is building a $28 billion chip campus outside Columbus, Ohio. The Stargate AI platform, representing more than $400 billion nationally, anchored sites in Ohio and a $15 billion campus in Wisconsin, where Microsoft is separately spending $3.3 billion. Honda and LG are putting up to $4.4 billion into a battery plant in Ohio. Nationwide, announced manufacturing commitments since early 2025 now exceed $1.7 trillion. Indiana sits in the gravitational center of that map — close enough to every supply chain to matter, cheap enough on land and power to win the projects.

Pharmaceuticals, data centers, batteries, chips and defense are converging on one state at the same moment, on top of a public foundation of federal infrastructure and a defense budget north of $848 billion. These are decade-long, capital-intensive commitments that drop thousands of high-wage workers into communities where housing remains affordable and undersupplied, exactly what Realtor.com just confirmed. Capital follows jobs, jobs follow these projects, and people follow both.

Indiana spent a long time being underestimated. Many companies writing the biggest checks in America have stopped making that mistake. I suspect several more will follow.•

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Barratt is the founder and CEO of BAM Capital.