A year on from the April 2, 2025 "Liberation Day" tariffs, the reshoring story has been carried almost entirely by press releases — pledged investment totals that, by one tally, reached roughly $330 billion in announced foreign direct investment, about 150% above the first year under the prior administration, against a White House claim of $6 trillion in total investment. IoT Analytics has now put hard data behind that narrative, and the conclusion matters for anyone planning capacity, freight, or hiring: the announcement count is the wrong number. The number to trust is the gap between what has been announced and what is actually coming online.
What IoT Analytics actually found
In its Industrial Macro Pulse – May 2026 report (published May 12, 2026), IoT Analytics found total US manufacturing construction spending down roughly 21% from its June 2024 peak of about $239 billion through March 2026. That headline decline is misleading on its own, because it is concentrated in one category.
The drag is electronics. Spending on electronics factories and semiconductor fabs collapsed about 44% from its July 2024 peak — and at that peak, electronics had accounted for more than half of all manufacturing construction spending. Strip electronics out, and the picture is neither boom nor bust: ex-electronics manufacturing construction spending rose just 5.6% between February 2025 and March 2026 — roughly 2.3% after inflation. That is follow-through by firms that had already committed, not a tariff-driven surge.
IoT Analytics CEO Knud Lasse Lueth framed the disconnect directly: "It is striking that over the past 12 months, dozens of manufacturing CEOs have publicly committed to expanding US manufacturing capacity, fueling considerable optimism" — even as the leading indicators show little reshoring beyond a normal cyclical upswing.
Separate the three states: announced, broken ground, running
The press-release count misleads because it collapses three distinct states into one. The first is the announcement. The Council on Foreign Relations contrasts the headline pledges with a different cut of the same series, noting that manufacturing construction spending fell from $230.9 billion in January 2025 to $196.2 billion in January 2026 — pledges up, dollars in the ground down.
The second state is groundbreaking. Eli Lilly's roughly $27 billion plan spans Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Alabama, with the Alabama site breaking ground in 2026 — a concrete milestone, but still years from output. The third state is a running line. Johnson & Johnson's $55 billion pledge, made in 2025, is set to ramp over five to seven years. A single announcement can sit in any of these states; counting them as equivalent is how the optimism gets inflated.
Sizing the gap: why 18–24 months is the right discount
It is worth being precise about what IoT Analytics did and did not publish. The report documents the divergence between announced commitments and the leading-indicator data qualitatively — it does not publish a single lag figure. The 18-to-24-month window is analytical framing, not a reported statistic: it is the well-understood sum of permitting, equipment lead times, and labor ramp that separates a commitment from capacity.
That framing is corroborated from several independent directions. KPMG survey data cited by CFR shows the considering-versus-acting split clearly: 63% of executives were considering reshoring versus only 10% acting as of September 2025, with the acting share rising to 26% by 2026 but on one-to-three-year timelines. The same review notes an ISM survey in which 64% of US respondents had no plans to reshore. On the logistics side, FreightWaves observes that new-plant freight patterns do not settle until roughly 6 to 18 months after a facility opens — and a plant only opens after the permitting and equipment lag has already run. Layer that on J&J's stated multi-year ramp and the discount is unavoidable: aggregate pledge totals are a forward-looking number, and they should be pushed out by several quarters before they are treated as capacity.
Which lanes are actually converting
The lane-level cross-check is where the abstraction becomes operational. FreightWaves identifies four reshoring lanes actually converting to freight: pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, flatbed construction materials, and regional automotive supply chains. These are the categories where commitments are turning into trucks moving.
The trap is the lane with the biggest dollar figure. Semiconductors carry the single largest reshoring investment total but generate little truckload freight, because high-value, low-volume output simply does not move much tonnage. The category that dominates the announcement headlines is the one least visible in the operating data — which is exactly why the announcement count and the capacity signal point in different directions.
The coincident signal: a real present-tense rebound
Skepticism about forward-looking pledges should be paired with a coincident demand signal, and there is a clean one. The April 2026 Metalworking Index from Gardner Intelligence registered 56.8, up 1.5 points from March and marking a fourth consecutive month of expansion, with every component above 50 except exports. This is activity happening now, not a commitment about later.
The internals carry a caution. Supplier deliveries gained more than five points — lengthening lead times — while the Future Business Index sat at 68.4 and was tapering, with material price inflation and stretching supplier lead times flagged as the principal headwinds. The rebound is real and present-tense; it is also showing the early friction of a tightening supply base.
Operator takeaway
The discipline is to sort signals by tense. Trust the coincident ones: metalworking activity that is expanding month over month, lane-level freight that is actually converting in pharma, food and beverage, flatbed, and regional automotive, and confirmed groundbreakings. Discount the forward-looking ones — aggregate FDI and capex pledge totals — by the multi-quarter permitting, equipment, and labor gap before treating them as capacity.
And note where the industrial growth actually is. IoT Analytics reports data center construction running at roughly a $47 billion annualized rate as of January 2026 — up about 31% year over year and roughly five times its January 2020 level — with power and infrastructure construction up about 6% year over year. The real industrial growth story of the past year is electricity and data, not reshored factories. For operators, that is the most actionable read in the entire report: the capacity coming online is being built for compute and the grid, and the reshoring boom remains, for now, a forward-looking number.
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