For the past two years, site selection consultants have increasingly emphasized that power availability has become one of the first questions in evaluating industrial locations. Area Development's annual survey of corporate site selection consultants reflects that shift, ranking energy availability among the most important location factors while highlighting the growing importance of site readiness. Brooklin Salemi, senior managing director at Newmark, said "access to power and water currently reign supreme" in today's site decisions. At the same time, Alexandra Segers, president of Tochi Advisors, noted that factors such as corporate tax structure and favorable property tax frameworks have moved toward the bottom of many clients' decision lists as infrastructure constraints take precedence.
New York Is Spending $100 Million to Build Sites Before Anyone Asks For Them
Empire State Development launched its POWER UP program in late 2025, with an initial $100 million of a $300 million total commitment to upgrade electrical infrastructure at industrial sites across New York before a specific company is even in the picture. The first awards are arriving in 2026. The idea is to build an inventory of what the state calls power-ready sites: locations where substation work, transformer capacity, and utility coordination are already done, so the gap between site selection and operational launch shrinks. New York's Department of Public Service reviews proposed upgrades against real utility capital planning rather than political promises. The program treats grid capacity the way states have historically treated highway access or fiber connectivity: base infrastructure built in advance, not a negotiation that starts after a company shows interest.
North Carolina Turned Utility Coordination Into Part of the Sales Pitch
North Carolina's ElectriCities network runs a "Smart Site" certification that verifies a site's electric capacity and utility readiness ahead of time. Siemens Mobility's advanced manufacturing and rail services facility in Lexington, North Carolina, a project representing more than $220 million in investment, is sited on ground that carried that certification, and ElectriCities says the early coordination on electric capacity helped support the company's decision to build there. That is a meaningfully different pitch than a tax credit schedule. It says the state had already done engineering work a company would otherwise have to commission itself, rather than promising savings after the fact.
Utility-Led Buildouts Are Winning Data Center Projects the Same Way
The clearest examples of this pattern so far are data center wins rather than manufacturing wins, but they show the same dynamic playing out at utility scale. In Arkansas, Entergy agreed to build Cypress Solar, a dedicated 600-megawatt solar array paired with a 350-megawatt battery storage system, specifically to serve Google's first Arkansas data center, a $4 billion cloud and AI investment in West Memphis. In Mississippi, Amazon's data center expansion, including a project in Vicksburg, is backed by Entergy's Superpower Mississippi plan, a roughly $3.5 billion buildout of new generation capacity; the state legislature also passed a law exempting Entergy's contract with Amazon from standard Public Service Commission review specifically so the utility could move fast enough to meet the company's timeline. Neither project was won primarily on price. Both required a utility willing to commit capital ahead of confirmed demand, a decision that carries real financial risk if the load never fully materializes. Not every state has answered rising data center demand this way. Washington state instead moved to regulate large-load facilities directly, requiring dedicated utility tariffs to prevent cost shifts onto other ratepayers. Both approaches respond to the same underlying pressure, but only one of them doubles as an economic development pitch.
The Incentive Playbook Is Being Rewritten Underneath Governors' Feet
None of this means tax incentives have disappeared. States still offer them, and companies still ask about them. What has changed is where they sit on the list. Area Development's consultants describe 2026 as rewarding states that are not just broadly business-friendly, but precise: aligned across utilities, permitting authorities, and workforce systems in ways that hold up once a project actually needs to move. That kind of alignment is harder to fake than a tax rate, and it takes years to build rather than a legislative session. It also means the transmission-locked surplus problem some states face, where generation exists but can't reach demand centers, is really the same readiness gap from a different angle. For governors and economic development officials, the practical implication is uncomfortable: the states that started upgrading substations and pre-certifying industrial sites three or four years ago are the ones winning the projects arriving today, and states still planning around the assumptions of that earlier era may already be behind. 2026 is rewarding adaptation to current constraints over recovery to old assumptions, and grid readiness is where that shows up first in state economic development.
