The South’s rise is closing fast

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. opened a 6,500-person campus outside Dallas in 2017, it wasn’t chasing cheap rent. The 1 million-square-foot facility allowed the banking giant to consolidate regional offices and unify half of its North Texas workforce under one roof, while capitalizing on the area’s explosive economic and population growth, leveraging significant tax incentives. The bank now employs nearly 30,000 people in Texas, more than in New York State, where its headquarters still sits. The Park Avenue tower isn’t moving; the company’s center of gravity already has.

That’s the part of the Southern boom most business leaders still misread. The question was never whether it’s happening; the GDP charts settled that.

The question is how long business leaders have to claim their stake in the South’s advantages before the window closes. The South’s advantages are concrete, finite, and being consumed in real time. The AI build-out pouring hundreds of billions into Texas and Georgia is straining grids never designed for it. Water, not taxes, is becoming the binding constraint of the decade. The reapportionment that will hand the region outsized political clout doesn’t arrive until 2030—but the land, power contracts, and talent pipelines that decide the winners are being locked in this year. Companies treating the South as a bet they can make at leisure are already arriving late.

SOUTHERN STATES ARE BOOMING

In 2023, Bloomberg reported that for the first time in records dating to the 1990s, six Southern states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—contributed more to national GDP than the entire Washington-New York-Boston corridor. By 2025, Bloomberg Businessweek had stopped hedging and declared: The United States Is Southern Now.

The numbers are hard to overstate. The South has captured roughly two-thirds of all U.S. job growth since early 2020 and nearly all the nation’s population gains since the last census—with Texas and Florida alone responsible for about 70% of the country’s growth.

The latest data only reinforces the trend: our new report, Accelerating South, documents that all five of the top U.S. net-domestic-migration states from 2024 to 2025 were Southern, with Florida and South Carolina tying for the nation’s highest real GDP growth rate at 3.1%. South Carolina is logging its third consecutive year near the top of the national leaderboard.

THE NEW SOUTH

For most of American history, the opposite was true: the South trailed the nation in income, education, and infrastructure. The “New South” is itself nearly 140 years old—Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady coined it in an 1886 speech urging the region to rebuild around industry rather than plantation agriculture. That vision took more than a century to arrive. It’s fully here, now.

This shift is driven by clear factors—lower taxes, lighter regulations, affordable land, and warm weather—complemented by remote work, which removed the final barrier to relocating. But the more telling development isn’t where people moved. It’s what they’re building.

Consider the “Battery Belt,” the corridor across Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Alabama that has drawn more than $90 billion in EV and battery investment—Hyundai’s $7.6 billion Metaplant near Savannah, Ford’s $5.6 billion BlueOval City outside Memphis—bets that once defined Michigan and Ohio. When federal EV credits lapsed in late 2025, several projects stalled, proof that policy still writes these stories.

The bigger rush is digital: Texas leads the nation with roughly $517 billion in announced data-center projects, and the region’s AI build-out now tops half a trillion dollars. The physical infrastructure of artificial intelligence is being poured into Southern soil.

THE SOUTH IS GAINING POLITICAL POWER

Population is the raw material of representation, and here the story becomes about power. According to my analysis, roughly half of Congress’ standing committees feature a chair or a ranking member from a Southern state. The 2030 census will compound that advantage: the Brennan Center projects the South could gain about nine seats—its largest single-decade gain ever—with Texas adding four and Florida three, while New York loses three, Illinois two, and California as many as four, only the second seat loss in the state’s 175-year history. Because House seats set electoral votes, the same shift redraws the path to the presidency and reshuffles more than $1.1 trillion in annual federal funding.

But anyone reading the South as a conservative monolith ought to clean their glasses. Its largest metros—Atlanta, Houston, Charlotte, the new Research Triangle—are diverse and politically competitive, and most of the region’s recent growth has come from Black, Latino, and Asian residents. That’s why Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina anchor every serious battleground debate: the growth that gives Republicans a structural edge also gives Democrats their clearest path to contest it. The South isn’t just gaining power—it’s becoming where national power is decided, as we saw in the 2020 presidential election.

BOTTOM LINE

That underlines the mistake business leaders make with a shift this size: treating it like the weather, something to dress for rather than to influence. The policy architecture of the new South is still being drafted. The incentive packages, permitting timelines, energy and water rules, and workforce programs that will govern the next 20 years are being negotiated right now, in statehouses, city halls, and county commissions gaining outsized leverage by the year.

At Ohio River South, we’ve spent years helping companies engage exactly those decisions across the South—because the firms that show up to shape how a state courts industry, trains workers, and powers a data center help write the rules they’ll operate under for a generation. The ones that stay on the sidelines inherit whatever gets decided without them.

The South’s rise isn’t a spectator sport. The smartest operators won’t simply relocate to the next American century; they’ll help design it. And undeniably, it will be a Southern one.

Howard Franklin is the founder and CEO of Ohio River South.