~ By John H. (“Jack”) Boyd, The Boyd Company, Inc., Location Consultant ~
A 2023 site selection study names and describes a series of top current and emerging high tech corridors in the U.S. and carries out a detailed comparative operating cost analysis.
The Boyd findings show total annual operating costs ranging from a high of $53.6 million in the Bay Area Route 101 Corridor in Northern California to a low of $39.5 million in the Central Texas SH 130 Corridor. Overall costs were scaled to a hypothetical 350,000 sq. ft. advanced manufacturing facility employing 500 workers.
Why Corridors
Currently, site-seeking companies want to access the greatest labor market and workforce assets possible amid today’s historic labor shortages brought on by the pandemic’s Great Resignation. With shovel-ready real estate options also at a premium, the geography of the site search is being expanded out of necessity. Companies also want to have fast and easy access to major infrastructure like airports, other transportation hubs, centers of talent in-migration and hubs of support services but also in locations that offer affordable operating cost structures.
Because of all these factors, many site-seeking companies begin their search along a prominent interstate highway or public transit corridor. The new Boyd study identifies 30 top high-tech highway corridors in the U.S. and provides a detailed comparative operating cost analysis scaled to a representative advanced manufacturing plant.
Top 30 U.S. High-Tech Corridors
The 30 top high-tech corridors named and surveyed in the Boyd analysis are profiled below, alphabetically by state.
Phoenix Loop 101 Corridor: State Route 101 or Loop 101 is a semi-beltway looping around the Phoenix’s East Valley connecting several key tech hubs of Phoenix, including Tolleson, Glendale, Peoria, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe and Chandler. Historically, Phoenix’s East Valley has been a longtime base of major tech players like Intel, Motorola and Apple, and is now home to an expanding number of high tech companies in sectors like aerospace, semiconductors, data centers, autonomous vehicles and other advanced manufacturing industries.
Los Angeles I-405 Corridor: Located south of downtown Los Angeles, stretching from Playa Vista where Google and Facebook maintain a large presence to El Segundo, this corridor leverages the legacy of Southern California’s huge aerospace industry cluster and its proximity to LAX. The southern parts of Culver City and Hawthorne – housing operations of SpaceX – are also part of this tech corridor activity.
Inland Empire I-215 Corridor: Interstate 215 is the main north/south highway serving California’s Inland Empire. The Inland Empire is a region adjacent to coastal Southern California, centering around the cities of San Bernardino and Riverside, and bordering Los Angeles County to the west. While largely known as the nation’s leading center of distribution warehousing operations, the region also is home to a growing number of advanced manufacturing firms in sectors like electrical instruments, aircraft parts, medical imaging equipment, precision plastic injection molding and metal fabrication.
Sacramento Highway 50 Corridor: This corridor connects Davis, home of the University of California at Davis, one of the top ag-tech schools in the nation, to the Eldorado Hills area east of Sacramento. Sacramento has been attracting much high tech investment relocating out of the higher cost San Francisco Bay Area in recent years. This corridor houses McClellan Park, the former McClellan Air Force Base repurposed into a popular tech and logistics park by national real estate developer Industrial Realty Group (IRG).
San Diego I-5 Corridor: This corridor connects La Jolla with Del Mar in north San Diego County, California, an area housing one of the greatest concentrations of life sciences industry operations on the West Coast. The Salk Institute and Scripps Research, both known globally for their biotech breakthroughs, are developing major new research buildings in this corridor. Their neighbor, UC San Diego, is raising millions to build a home for the new Wertheim School of Public Health as well as another stand- alone biomedical lab complex.
Bay Area Route 101 Corridor: This is the mother of all high tech corridors connecting San Francisco with Silicon Valley to the south. It is literally the Silicon Valley’s backbone, with the biggest tech companies in the U.S. situated along this corridor, including Apple, Tesla, Google, Facebook, Oracle, HP and hundreds more in the stretch between Cupertino to downtown San Francisco.
Denver Highway 36 Corridor: Situated between Denver and Boulder, the 36 Corridor houses over 16,000 employees, hundreds of tech startups and established companies along with a talent pool of 45,000 students at the main and large campus of University of Colorado – Boulder.
Connecticut I-95 Corridor: Stretching from Boston to New York City, this well-established Northeast U.S. corridor includes Connecticut’s Stamford, New Haven and Rhode Island’s Providence which are home to large concentrations of advanced manufacturing, media and financial services companies.
Central Florida I-4 Corridor: Stretching southwest to northeast across the Florida peninsula, this high-growth corridor houses Florida’s largest high tech and advanced manufacturing community. The region includes portions of Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando and proceeds on to the state’s famous Space Coast.
South Florida I-95 Corridor: This 73-mile stretch of interstate highway in South Florida connects Miami with Palm Beach County and is home to a growing concentration of high tech, med tech, aerospace and financial services companies. It is one of the hottest industrial real estate markets in the country.
Atlanta I-20 Corridor: This corridor is located east of Atlanta where electric vehicle-maker Rivian recently announced plans for a major new EV assembly plant able to manufacture up to 400,000 vehicles a year, many for Amazon, a large investor in the company. Rivian’s 2,000-acre site lies between the towns of Social Circle and Rutledge and about a third of the way from Atlanta to Augusta. This corridor also includes the small boom town of Covington where South Korean semiconductor manufacturer SKC and lithium battery recycler Battery Resources are opening new plants.
Chicago I-90 Corridor: This busy and well-established Illinois interstate highway corridor connects downtown Chicago with O’Hare Airport and proximate Northwest ChicagoLand tech markets like Rosemont, Schaumberg, Elk Grove, Hoffman Estates and others.
Indianapolis Keystone Parkway Corridor: This north/south highway connects Indianapolis to high-growth northern metro submarkets like Carmel, Westfield, Noblesville and Fishers. The Corridor houses large concentrations of med tech, financial services, advanced manufacturing and logistics operations.
Maryland I-270 Corridor: This high tech corridor located just northwest of Washington, D.C. runs from Maryland’s Bethesda to Gaithersburg. It houses the mammoth campus of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), FDA headquarters and one of the largest concentrations of biotechnology and life sciences firms in the country.
Boston Route 128 Corridor: This 55-mile Boston beltway that is Route 128 earned the name “America’s Technology Highway” preceding the first tech boom in the late 90s owing to the high number of technology firms in the area. Today, this corridor continues to house a large high tech concentration in IT, life sciences and software.
Michigan I-94 Corridor: The Interstate 94 Corridor traverses the Detroit metro area in an east/west direction parallel to the Detroit River. The Corridor houses hundreds of advanced manufacturing plants, both in and out of the region’s massive auto industry. In Wayne County, Ford recently announced the automaker will produce an all-new Ranger pickup at its Michigan Assembly Plant and an all-new Mustang coupe at its Flat Rock Assembly Plant. Also in Wayne, Our Next Energy, a Detroit startup, plans to spend $1.6 billion on an electric vehicle gigafactory.
Michigan I-96 Corridor: Stretching from Detroit to Lansing, Michigan, this corridor is home to one of nation’s largest concentration of advanced manufacturing operations, many in the automobile, EV and auto parts manufacturing sector. GM will spend $2.6 billion to build a new battery factory in the Lansing area and also spend about half a billion dollars to make upgrades to its two existing vehicle assembly plants in Lansing.
Minneapolis I-94 Corridor: This downtown corridor of the Twin Cities connects the Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses of the University of Minnesota. This urban core corridor is home to hundreds of start-up and established companies in med tech, IT, software and financial services.
Southern Nevada I-515 Corridor: The Interstate 515 Corridor is a 14-mile spur of Interstate 15 that connects the downtown Las Vegas Spaghetti Bowl Interchange with the high growth suburban community of Henderson. The Corridor is home to a new $600 million Google data center and Haas Automation’s $327 million plant that will open in late 2023. Haas Automation is the largest machine tool builder in the western world. The Corridor is also home to Harry Reid International Airport with major air freight capabilities.
New Jersey Route 1 Corridor: Stretching from New Brunswick to Princeton, this central New Jersey corridor is home to a huge pharma industry concentration, including the nation’s largest pharma and med tech company, Johnson & Johnson, which is headquartered in New Brunswick. The corridor also houses two major academic research institutions: Rutgers University in New Brunswick and Princeton University in Princeton.
Upstate New York I-90 Corridor: Transcontinental I-90 runs from Seattle to Boston. For most of its length in New York, I-90 follows the New York Thruway, the state’s main toll highway and the longest toll highway in the country. In New York, I-90 has emerged as a leading tech corridor in the Northeast U.S. for the semiconductor industry. The corridor houses Edwards Vacuum, the UK-based global supplier to the semiconductor industry at the New York Science & Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park in Genesee County, semiconductor giant Micron near Syracuse and SUNY Polytech and Global Foundries in the Albany area.
Long Island Expressway Corridor: This corridor is located just east of New York City and stretches 50 miles across the middle of Long Island from the former Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Suffolk County. It houses notable research centers like the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s new Center for Therapeutics Research and a diverse group of companies in aerospace, defense, pharma, financial services and information technology.
Columbus Ohio I-70 Corridor: Interstate 70 is a core roadway of the Columbus metro area and is of additional importance in the Dayton area to the immediate south. Semiconductor manufacturer Intel is investing $20 billion on a new chip manufacturing site in New Albany in Licking County just east of Columbus along the I-70 Corridor. Home to Ohio State University, the metro area houses major operations of Honda, Owens Corning, Boeing, Amazon Web Services, Dupont, Cardinal Health and others.
Philadelphia Route 202 Corridor: This suburban corridor of Philadelphia in Montgomery and Chester counties stretches southwest along U.S. Highway 202 – the 59 mile-long highway that connects New Jersey to the north with Delaware to the south – and houses as a major concentration of advanced manufacturing and R&D activities in fields like pharma, software, IT and aerospace.
Portland Sunset Highway Corridor: The Sunset Corridor stretches approximately 10 miles along U.S. Highway 26, west from downtown Portland to the Hillsboro area. It is in the heart of Washington County, which is home to two of metro Portland’s top employers, Nike and Intel, which employ over 27,000 people in this corridor.
Central Texas SH 130 Corridor: Opened in 2012, the SH 130 expressway links some of the most prized industrial real estate in the nation spurred by new multi-billion dollar projects of Tesla, Samsung, Apple, Navistar and others in and around the Central Texas communities served by this high-speed expressway. The intelligent infrastructure roadway – having the highest legal speed limit in the nation – serves as a fast link between the high-growth metro areas of Austin and San Antonio. The corridor was constructed and financed by the SH 130 Concession Co., which operates and maintains the roadway and plays an active role in economic development matters in the Central Texas region.
Dallas Telecom Corridor: Since the early 1990s, the stretch of U.S. Highway 75 extending north from downtown Dallas has been known as the Telecom Corridor—named for the many telecommunications companies that once lined that highway, many in Richardson. Today, the corridor – which is also home to the University of Texas at Dallas – extends further north beyond Richardson and on to Plano, Allen and McKinney and is home to additional industries beyond just telecom like aerospace, logistics, financial services and software.
Dulles Technology Corridor: The Dulles Technology Corridor is a business cluster containing many defense and technology companies located in Northern Virginia near Washington Dulles International Airport. This corridor houses more telecom and satellite companies than any other region in the U.S. The cluster encompasses a string of communities that lie along and between the Dulles Toll Road and Virginia State Route 7, including Tysons Corner, Reston, Herndon, Sterling and Ashburn.
Northern Virginia I-66 Corridor: Interstate 66 runs east from an interchange with I-81 near Middletown, Virginia, to an interchange with U.S. Route 29 in Washington, D.C. Due to their proximity to federal agencies and densely packed fiber backbones, Prince William and Fauquier Counties along this corridor house a massive network of data centers that currently move an overwhelming percentage of the world’s daily internet traffic. Major employers in the region include the U.S. Department of Defense, OVH Cloud, VA Data, Iron Mountain, SAIC, George Mason University and hundreds of government and defense contracting firms.
Seattle I-90 Corridor: This Pacific Northwest corridor houses a major cluster of aerospace, software and medical technology companies. This highly-concentrated, 10-mile corridor stretches east from downtown Seattle to the popular suburban submarket of Bellevue.
About Boyd:
Devoted exclusively to corporate mobility, The Boyd Company, Inc., is a leading authority in comparative business cost analysis. Founded in 1975 in Princeton, NJ, Boyd provides independent site selection counsel to leading U.S. and overseas corporations. Advanced manufacturing clients of Boyd include Boeing, Hewlett- Packard, Pratt & Whitney, APC/Schneider Electric, Safran Landing Gear, Philips, Tritium and other Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies.
