The United States is going through turbulent times. The shock of the pandemic, followed by soaring inflation and high interest rates, buffeted Americans. Now, despite strong labor markets and continued economic growth, many people feel pervasive uncertainty about what’s next for the country.
Against this backdrop, some companies continue to show their faith in America’s future by putting their money on the line. PPI’s annual Investment Heroes report highlights how the country’s largest companies are investing in the United States using information from annual financial reports. This year’s 2024 Investment Heroes are the 25 companies with the highest capital expenditure investment in the United States in 2023, as measured by PPI’s methodology.
For the fifth consecutive year, Amazon was #1 on the list, investing an estimated $36.8 billion in the U.S. in 2023. Since 2019, Amazon has invested $183 billion in the U.S., according to PPI’s estimates. This staggering spending on productive capital has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, while holding down consumer price increases.
In the #2 spot of the 2024 Investment Heroes list is Alphabet, with an estimated $24.5 billion in domestic capital spending in 2023. It is followed by Meta, AT&T, Verizon, Walmart, Intel, Microsoft, Comcast, and Duke Energy.
Taken as a whole, this year’s top 25 Investment Heroes invested a record $328.3 billion in the United States in 2023, up 1.3% compared to 2022. In recent years, the growth of domestic capital expenditures by PPI’s Investment Heroes has outstripped the growth of overall U.S. nonresidential investment (Figure 1). For example, since 2019, domestic capex by PPI’s Investment Heroes has risen by 34.8%, compared to a 24.2% increase in total nonresidential investment over the same period.
Here’s another sign of growth, In 2021-2023, the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, PPI’s Investment Heroes
invested more than $900 billion in the U.S. economy. That’s almost 40% more than the comparable total in the first three years of the Trump-Pence Administration.
This massive surge in capital spending has helped power job creation and economic growth. The U.S. economy is outperforming its industrialized peers in Europe and Japan, to a significant degree due to the domestic investments by the companies on this year’s list.
But there are more benefits to capital expenditures. Over the long run, more investment in capacity helps hold down price increases. In this report, we highlight the relationship between sectors with strong investment, such as e-commerce and wireless, and long-term low inflation trends for some goods and services.
In this report, we also consider patterns of spending on research and development, which boosts innovation and productivity growth. We note the reasons that R&D spending cannot be directly integrated into the Investment Heroes ranking. Nevertheless, many Investment Heroes have huge R&D budgets. Alphabet, for example, spent $45.4 billion on R&D in 2023. Some companies are making big investments in R&D, but do not appear on the Investment Heroes list because their spending is not reflected in their capital expenditures.
We examine patterns of domestic capital investment by sector and company. The biggest contributor to the Investment Heroes list is the tech/internet sector, with six companies on the list investing a total of $97 billion in the U.S. in 2023. The second biggest contributor is the broadband/wireless sector, with 4 companies and $68 billion in domestic capital investment.
