When Mark Kvamme, a former partner at Sequoia Capital, left Silicon Valley for Columbus, Ohio, in 2011, colleagues told him that he was making a career-ending mistake.
“Ohio is where venture capitalists go to die,” he recalled one of them saying.
Fifteen years later, Columbus, the state capital known as the headquarters for insurance companies and retail brands like Victoria’s Secret, has been transformed. The metropolitan area has become a critical hub for advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence.
Mr. Kvamme now runs The O.H.I.O. Fund, a private fund that has raised $647 million to invest in businesses in the state. His portfolio includes Connect Housing Blocks and Eagle Wireless, a Cleveland-area manufacturer of cellular modules, tiny electronic components that had previously been mostly produced in China.
Some of the most ambitious tech projects in the United States are rising from the farmlands outside the city. Mark Zuckerberg recently stopped by to check on the development of a Meta facility that will train advanced artificial intelligence models. Intel is constructing a $28 billion fabrication facility that will build some of its most advanced chips.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of the defense tech start-up Anduril, said he planned to buy a house here, to be close to the company’s $1 billion factory that will build autonomous drones for the U.S. military.
In a 200,000-square-foot factory on the west side of Columbus, Andy Lonsberry, chief executive of Path Robotics, demonstrated an autonomous robotic dog with a welding torch for a head. Using sensors invented by Path, the robot was able to identify the seam on a metal wall that it was supposed to weld. It aimed its torch, and sent sparks flying.
Path Robotics has raised $370 million from investors since 2018, and entered into a partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries, the military shipbuilder, to tackle a shortage of welders, often a bottleneck in American manufacturing.
“Columbus is booming,” said Dennis DeMeyere, a former technical director at Google Cloud, who plans to open an A.I.-powered manufacturing company, Autonomous Production, near Columbus. “It’s wild. Everything is under construction. It feels like the Bay Area felt 13 or 14 years ago.”
The Columbus metro area, home to more than 2.2 million people, grew by 21,312 people between 2024 and 2025, according to census data.
The Columbus metro area ranks 46th out of 100 metro areas for manufacturing job growth, according to an analysis by Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings program.
Federal investment — most notably the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act — has helped propel construction in the Columbus area by providing billions in subsidies for domestic semiconductor production, Mr. Muro said.
“In a short period the Columbus metro has climbed substantially,” he said, adding that the region previously ranked 70th.
For years, Ohio officials have aggressively courted companies by offering grants, low taxes and light regulation. Many businesses that set up shop here get a high level of cooperation from local government officials and educational institutions, a tradition that is often referred to as the “Columbus Way.”
However, the very things that attracted large companies to the area — the speed of construction and relationships with government officials — has raised concern from ordinary people who said they didn’t have much input about what was being built in their communities.
In December, state lawmakers passed a bill that forbids the release of information submitted by companies seeking tax breaks or other economic development incentives. That has made it more difficult for the public to weigh in.
A bill that would bar certain officials from signing such nondisclosure agreements was filed in February by two Republican state representatives, including Brian Stewart of Ashville, who represents Pickaway County, where Anduril has built its factory.
Pari Sabety, a former budget director for Ted Strickland, Ohio’s last Democratic governor, said economic development in Columbus often served big business but not the community itself.
“They have used the ‘Columbus Way’ as their moniker to extract unending subsidies from the city and the state for highly profitable companies,” she said.
But Mr. Kvamme said it would be foolish to change a winning formula.
“They are killing the golden goose,” he said.