For decades, FDI (Foreign Direct Investment, FDI) was seen as an almost automatic consequence of: capital followed promising markets, abundant labor and competitive costs. This world is falling behind.
Evidence accumulated in recent years shows that FDI has once again become an active instrument of structural transformation, capable of shaping production chains, moving industrial centers and redefining economic geography.
A broad study by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), “The FDI shake-up: how foreign direct investment today may shape industry and trade tomorrow”, analyzes around 200 thousand greenfield investment announcements in the world since 2015 and points out a relevant change: international productive investment is reduced in the number of projects, although with higher values, it has become more sectorally and geographically concentrated, faster in execution and clearly more strategic.
Since 2022, around 75% of global FDI announcements have targeted “future-shaping” sectors: semiconductors, data centers, batteries, electric vehicles, energy and critical minerals.
Before the pandemic, this percentage was just over half. In parallel, investments in traditional manufacturing and conventional services lost ground; a trend that also appears in recent surveys by Unctad (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) on global productive investment.
This transformation is not just sectoral; it is also geopolitical. The study shows that the so-called “geopolitical distance” of FDI has been falling at a faster rate than international trade since 2017.
In other words, companies continue to invest outside their countries, but increasingly among partners considered trustworthy from a political, regulatory and strategic point of view. Flows between advanced economies grew, especially towards , while direct investment from these economies declined significantly.
Another striking feature is the size of the projects. The so-called “megadeals”, or investments above US$1 billion, represent only around 1% of the number of operations, but already concentrate approximately half of the total announced value of FDI.
These are semiconductor factories, battery gigafactories, large energy projects and data centers that require unprecedented volumes of capital and institutional coordination. These are sectors with “the winner takes most” dynamics, in which scale, financing and speed of execution make all the difference.
Although these projects concentrate significant volumes of capital, more recent analyzes by MGI itself and the International Energy Agency draw attention to the extremely high value of digital infrastructure projects (data centers) and their strong dependence on cheap, stable and available energy on a large scale.
In some markets, the risk of excess capacity and lower-than-promised returns is growing, especially when investment decisions anticipate gains that depend on technological advances that are still uncertain.
These trends have profound implications for countries, but also for the financial system. Banks, especially in emerging economies, can no longer analyze FDI just as a variable external to domestic credit. It started to function as an advanced indicator of where growth, risks and financing opportunities will be in the coming years.
For financial institutions, the challenge is twofold. On the one hand, the projects associated with this new FDI cycle are larger, more concentrated and more sensitive to regulatory, environmental and geopolitical decisions.
This requires more sophisticated financing structures, greater use of project finance and risk sharing with development banks and multilateral agencies, as well as risk assessments that go far beyond traditional financial indicators, a recurring point in recent BIS (Bank of International Settlements) analyzes of capital allocation in these sectors.
On the other hand, it opens up a relevant opportunity for institutions capable of acting as capital orchestrators, not just as credit providers. These projects require currency and commodity hedging, structuring of guarantees, long-term financing, coordination with public policies and, increasingly, solutions linked to the energy transition and digital infrastructure.
In the Brazilian case, the diagnosis is realistic. The country is unlikely to be a global hub for semiconductors or large hyperscale data centers. Still, it has relevant strategic assets — such as scaled renewable energy, critical minerals, a diversified industrial base and a large domestic market — that place it as an important connector in selected global chains.
Recent initiatives such as this signal an attempt to enter this new geography of investment in digital infrastructure. The challenge, however, lies in the design. Such projects require regulatory predictability, coordination with the electricity sector and institutional clarity. But they are not sustainable in the long term when they depend on permanent tax subsidies or excessive risk transfer to the public sector.
International experience suggests that successful policies are those that reduce structural inefficiencies and improve the business environment, without replacing the investor’s economic judgment or anticipating returns that the market itself has not yet proven.
The main lesson is that FDI is no longer a simple reflection of growth to become a vector of strategic choice, both for countries, companies and banks.
Ignoring this transformation means running the risk of being stuck in mature sectors and increasingly shorter cycles. Understanding it means anticipating where tomorrow will be.
