Central Ohio Becomes Hub for Tech and Manufacturing

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.

“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.”

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.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/business/ohio-tech-manufacturing-hub.html