by Eric J. Wallace
The Hampton Roads region has been a powerhouse manufacturing hub since the days of Captain John Smith and that status is getting a monster shot in the arm as the nation approaches its 250th birthday. Announcements around new facilities and expansions have dominated the recent business news cycle, coming in such rapid succession it’s often hard to keep track of them all.
Chesapeake’s Big Score
Most notable was a record-setting, $689 million pledge in early December from South Korea’s LS Cable & Systems Ltd. (LS C&S) to add production facilities for magnetic copper and rare earth magnets to its near-100-acre Chesapeake manufacturing campus. The products are critical for building advanced weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet, Javelin missile, nuclear subs, and unmanned aerial vehicles. The capital investment is the single largest in Coastal Virginia history and comes on the heels of a $681 million outlay to establish a U.S. headquarters for subsidiary, LS GreenLink, in Chesapeake in 2024. That company makes state-of-the-art submarine cables that transport offshore wind energy to the mainland and power the global internet. The two projects are expected to create about 730 high-paying jobs, combined.
“The decision by LS Cable & Systems to build its new facilities in our community demonstrates the confidence they have not only in Chesapeake’s talented workforce and strong business environment, but also in our commitment to helping businesses succeed here,” Chesapeake mayor, Rick West, said in a statement. “This investment is LS Cable’s second major project in Chesapeake and elevates our city’s status as a leader in the nation’s clean energy and electrification future.”
While that overseas infusion seized the limelight, deeply-rooted legacy companies have also upped the ante:
• The country’s largest military shipbuilder, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), released plans for a $28 million upgrade to its Hampton Light Manufacturing Advanced Technology facility a week before the LS C&S bombshell.
• Hundred-fifty-year-old Norfolk ship repair, maintenance, and conversion operation, Colonna’s Shipyard, Inc. (CSI), kicked off a $79 million project this past October to increase capacity by more than 25% via a fourth drydock.
• Virginia Beach got a share of the action when Acoustical Sheetmetal Company launched $45.8 million plans to build a 250,000-square-foot facility that will nearly double overall production space for highly engineered steel and aluminum enclosures that cater to the power generation industry. The three projects alone will collectively create more than 700 new positions for skilled workers.
The Business Boom Backstory
What’s behind the deluge of investiture and job creation? Hampton Roads Alliance (HRA) Chief Business Development Officer, Jared Chalk, points to three primary drivers.
“On the one hand, there’s been a significant increase in government military spending,” says Chalk. “And with the instability we’re seeing around the world right now, we expect that trend is only to grow as we move forward.”
The National Defense Authorization Act that passed in December greenlighted a record $901 billion in military spending in 2026 and President Trump recently floated the idea of a staggering $1.5 trillion budget for 2027 to build what he called “a dream military.” The statements came in the wake of the operation that captured Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, amid remarks that U.S. oversight of the country could potentially last for years.
The above coincides with a push toward remilitarization among allies like NATO and Australia. In December, both Canada and European member nations committed to increase annual military investment to at least 5% of gross domestic product by 2035. That number is a significant jump up from 2024’s 2.02%—and would yield a projected increase from $1.4 trillion in total annual spending to about $4.2 trillion in the next decade. Australia has simultaneously committed $240 billion to buy U.S.-built nuclear submarines over the next 30 years as part of 2021’s trilateral AUKUS alliance between it, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
All of this is accompanied by an effort to “reshore manufacturing and secure critical supply chains that power and protect our country,” continues Chalk. Lastly, the AI race has spiked demand for data centers and new electricity generation.
The HRA has been working directly with public and private partners to capitalize and position the region to capture “as big of a piece of that pie as we possibly can,” says Chalk. The process is made easier by the emergence of “a new economic order that plays directly to our strengths,” and “assets that few other regions can match.”
That list includes the widest, deepest and fastest growing port on the East Coast; a staggering 25% of U.S. shipbuilding and repair capacity—including the nation’s largest military shipbuilder and more than half of its nuclear submarine production—19 military installations; NATO’s North American headquarters; and the world’s largest naval base.
The ecosystem is made all the richer by a robust focus on workforce development and military talent retention.
Empowering the Workforce
“We’ve worked extremely hard to stay ahead of the game and understand companies’ needs well in advance,” says Hampton Roads Workforce Alliance (HRWC) President and CEO, Shawn Avery. Whether a company is new to the region or looking to expand, “we want to make sure they have access to a readymade pool of skilled workers right here at home.”
The HRWC works hand-in-hand with both military and educational partners to achieve that goal. The latter helps the organization connect with exiting service members in advance to try to funnel them into local retraining programs or job opportunities aligned with their experience. A fleet of new, skills-based education initiatives like Virginia Peninsula Community College’s $9 million Newport News Trades Center, which broke ground last August, are set to train students to graduate into high-demand jobs in maritime and residential construction.
And spoiler alert: Chalk says these factors will gain positive momentum into 2026 and beyond.
Centered on Core Strengths
The recent wave of big manufacturing wins is aligned in lockstep with a comprehensive regionwide reboot in strategy that focuses on traditional strengths.
“For a long time, the consensus seemed to be that we needed to diversify away from our status as a legacy maritime and defense hub,” says Colonna’s Chairman and CEO, Randall Crutchfield. But now “it looks like we’ve collectively decided the best path forward is to own our identity and really lean into those strengths.”
The sentiment was formalized when the HRA released its next-gen, Hampton Roads Regional Playbook (HRRP), during a Virginia Beach forum called “It’s Go Time” this past October. It prioritizes and outlines collaborative strategies for unified economic development across four sectors: Defense, Energy, Aerospace and Logistics.
The DEAL categories “form the foundation of our regional economy [and] are the pillars that have long sustained Hampton Roads,” writes HRA President and CEO, Douglas L. Smith, in the Playbook’s introduction. What’s new “is our deliberate focus on deepening and accelerating growth in these sectors. In doing so, we are diversifying within our strengths, not away from them, expanding the impact of what already defines us.”
Former Brookings Institution Vice President and Director of Drexel University’s Nowak Metro Finance Lab, Bruce Katz, calls the Playbook “remarkable.”
The HRRP “recognizes, more than any city, metropolitan, or state strategy of which we are aware, that the U.S. has entered a new era of industrial urgency,” writes Katz in a follow-up newsletter. “The wars in Europe and the Middle East, China’s threats in the Pacific, and the militarization of advanced technologies have forced the United States to confront a simple reality: domestic production of complex systems—including ships, submarines, aircraft, sensors, drones, energy assets, and autonomous systems—is once again a national priority.”
While the U.S. continues to lead innovation around the globe’s most advanced systems, production falls well short of global demand. The design and delivery gap has become a national security risk.
Closing it “requires a new generation of regions capable of building entire systems—places that combine production, research, training, logistics, energy and innovation in a single industrial geography,” Katz writes. “These are the emerging defense-industrial metros, where local governments and metropolitan corporations and institutions align shared missions of national importance.”
Katz goes on to praise Hampton Roads as a model for what that process should look like in real time, saying our region is helping to define what the next generation of American industrial leadership should look like.
