Over the course of 2025, President Trump made bold claims about the amount of investment pouring into the United States from foreign countries. With his administration putting steep tariffs on imports, he argued, foreign companies would be forced to locate their factories in America for access to the U.S. market.

Mr. Trump claimed investment numbers that increased from $17 trillion last September, to $18 trillion in December, to $21 trillion. That would amount to two-thirds of U.S. gross domestic product, and is far more than the White House ever enumerated on its website tracking the commitments.

Nevertheless, some of that investment was promised by U.S. trading partners who were looking for ways to appease the president in the face of stiff tariffs. Mr. Trump extracted about $5 trillion in commitments, over the course of up to 10 years, from the European Union, Asia and the Persian Gulf. If that money materialized, it would constitute an overwhelming influx of capital, nearly double the average rate of investment America received from 2015 through 2024.

Investment deals can take years to close, meaning that definitive evidence will take time to show up. For now, the early data contains notes of both promise and concern. Factors other than federal policy probably contributed to an apparent surge in new foreign investment last year, while a broader measure suggests that, on the whole, foreign investors are treading cautiously.

“This year, some things are positive, but it’s a mixed picture,” said Gregory Auclair, a statistician with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It just means that you’re going to need a lot in future years to catch up with the amounts that are promised, if they are credible at all.”

New foreign direct investment in the United States rebounded significantly, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The figure increased to $232 billion last year from $155 billion in 2024, reversing a three-year downward trend. The data includes foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies, as well as money foreign firms spend to establish new companies and expand existing ones. The ramp-up is also reflected in project announcements collected by FDI Intelligence, a subsidiary of The Financial Times.

But the federal statistics agency publishes another measure that takes a more holistic view of investment, incorporating foreign money that is withdrawn from the country as well. When divestments, intracompany lending and other financial flows are included, the trajectory changes: Net investment into the United States decreased slightly last year and sat below the average for the previous decade.

In recent years, international capital has increasingly arrived in the form of earnings from U.S. affiliates that are reinvested locally, rather than from new businesses either purchased or built from the ground up.

“Companies that are sophisticated and familiar with the U.S. market continue to double down on their investments here, but new equity is just not coming into the U.S. in the proportion that it once was,” said Jonathan Samford, the president of the Global Business Alliance, which supports foreign investors. “The car continues down the highway in forward motion, but it’s not accelerating.”

Trump’s tariff stick

The Trump administration has used a heavy hand to push foreigners to invest in the United States, lowering tariffs on the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other trading partners in exchange for huge investment promises. Foreign governments and companies have pledged to invest in U.S. chip plants, nuclear projects, ports, mines and factories.

Some commitments, for example from the European Union, appear to contain repackaged announcements that companies had already intended to make. But the biggest such promise — a $550 billion investment pledge from Japan, America’s biggest source of foreign investment — has been moving forward.

The two governments announced a first set of investments they pegged at $36 billion in February, including plans in Ohio for the largest natural-gas-generation facility in history, as well as a deepwater crude-oil export facility in the Gulf of Mexico. In March, they announced another tranche of investments in the tens of billions of dollars, including nuclear plants.

They have been preparing to announce a third round of investments that contain more power and infrastructure projects.

The Japanese investments have a novel structure negotiated by Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary and a former Wall Street financier. Japan provides the capital and shares in the cash flow from the projects. But while a foreign government or company owns the asset in traditional foreign direct investment, under this model the U.S. government owns it. Any private companies involved are paid a fee.

The United States is working on a similar model with South Korea and has presented the Korean government with a list of potential projects, though they have not been funded yet.

Kurt Tong, a former diplomat in Japan who is now a managing partner at the Asia Group, a consultancy, said he expected Japanese investment to rise significantly as a result of the deal. He added, though, that the $550 billion total was still probably “aspirational,” given that Japan’s entire investment stock in the United States was $754 billion in 2024.

The biggest challenge now for the deal is not the availability of capital from Japan, Mr. Tong said, but finding suitable U.S. projects.

“The bazooka is loaded with cash. Now they’ve got to find projects to shoot that cash at,” he said. “That’s the next difficult part of this whole exercise — is finding projects which are big enough and are bankable and feasible and at least somewhat strategic.”

Reva Goujon, a director at the Rhodium Group, a research firm, said uncertainty about forthcoming tariffs on semiconductors and other products, as well as over the U.S. trade deal with Canada and Mexico, was holding some investments back.

Foreign governments have felt less pressure to abide by deals made under the threat of tariffs that the Supreme Court overturned in February. For some companies, tariffs have raised the cost of imported inputs, like the steel, aluminum or machinery needed to build new factories.

But Ms. Goujon said Japan, which has been dealing with a stagnant economy, recognized the need to seek higher returns abroad and strengthen ties with the United States given security challenges from China.

“Is there political will by Japan and by many of these companies to invest in strategic projects in the U.S.?” she asked, rhetorically. “Absolutely.”

Bigger levers

Much of what pushes foreign investment up or down has little to do with government policy. Rather, it’s driven by macroeconomic factors that propel capital across borders, or technological developments that attract investors.

For example, the uptick in new foreign investment in 2025 was partly driven by lower interest rates that unfroze mergers and acquisitions, driving some of the foreign purchases of companies in America. The year also saw mounting investment in data centers for artificial intelligence, reaching nearly $500 billion worldwide, according to Gartner. The United Nations found that global foreign investment flows rose 6 percent in 2025, mostly across a small number of megaprojects in developed nations.

“This pickup — and many of the sectors are similar — is a global phenomenon,” said Adnan Mazarei, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It’s not entirely obvious that this is a result of tariffs or not, because the Europeans are not doing this, but there is huge investment happening in, for example, A.I. and data centers all over the world.”

But political decisions can swamp those larger forces, and Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran may be one of them. The resulting war has had two effects: One, it raised energy prices, which fueled inflation and drove up interest rates. And two, it made countries that had been large sources of outbound investment rethink their overseas projects.

That’s particularly true of nations in the Persian Gulf, which now have a lot of damaged energy and defense infrastructure to rebuild.

“The war is now slowing down the plan of outward investment,” said James Zhan, who heads the board of the World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies. “As the war is dragging longer, and there’s a cease-fire but there’s no durable peace, there’s no re-establishment of stability, so countries need to mind home.”

The war isn’t the only thing weighing on foreign investment. Removing Biden-era subsidies for clean energy development cut short a boom in battery manufacturing and renewable energy deployment, much of which was financed from overseas. That’s particularly true of Chinese companies, according to an analysis by the Rhodium Group.

The broader loss of confidence in the United States’ sticking to any policy commitments has damaged its reputation as a safe home for global capital. A survey by the consulting firm Kearney found that America substantially dropped in the eyes of foreign investors last year, with Canada and Japan gaining favor.

“I think there are some really fundamental doubts about the long-term trustworthiness of the U.S. both as an economic partner and a military ally,” said Thilo Hanemann, a partner at the Rhodium Group. He added, “There’s been a huge change of mind over the past two years on that.”

Perhaps a larger obstacle to the future of foreign investment comes in the form of skepticism of its benefits to local communities throughout the country. Although foreign companies employ millions of Americans, U.S. officials sometimes see them as unfair competition, or a security threat. That’s why Representative Ro Khanna of California and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, both Democrats, introduced a bill last month that would set up a board to evaluate the desirability of inbound investments, potentially adding uncertainty to deal-making processes.

Sam Moses, a site selection attorney with Parker Poe, said he had seen rising resistance to large industrial development. That’s especially true, he said, in states that have seen huge flows of foreign direct investment, like South Carolina, where he’s based. A blitz of data centers, which have voracious demand for water and electricity, has also soured public opinion about many kinds of megaprojects.

“They’re concerned about traffic and infrastructure and how the company’s location will impact all of that,” Mr. Moses said. “There’s a lot of balancing going on in states that have historically been targets.”