Florida Policy Index

Florida leads the nation in skilled trades demand but ranks near the bottom in workforce supply, raising concerns for advanced manufacturing, autonomous defense, maritime industries and healthcare.

Florida’s economic identity is changing faster than its traditional image suggests. From 2014 to 2024, the state’s current-dollar GDP increased from approximately $860 billion to $1.73 trillion. Even after inflation, output grew roughly 49 percent.

Florida’s economic development strategy is increasingly focused on a new set of priorities: industrial capacity, skilled workforce development and infrastructure capable of supporting defense, maritime and advanced manufacturing.

Florida is often recognized for tourism, real estate, agriculture, and financial services. Yet one of the state's most important economic engines receives far less attention than it deserves. Manufacturing contributes approximately $90 billion annually to Florida's economy, supports hundreds of thousands of jobs across the state, and generates roughly 90 percent of Florida's merchandise exports.

Florida is emerging as a critical hub in autonomous defense and the energy infrastructure required to sustain it—where megawatts, not just munitions, will define the next phase of national security.

For years, the digital economy was defined by its lack of physical constraints. Cloud computing, mobile platforms, and software-driven services created the perception of a system that could scale without friction—light, flexible, and largely detached from the physical world. Artificial intelligence is reversing that model.

Today, roughly 9,000 data centers operate worldwide, with the United States hosting the largest share by a wide margin. Despite periodic claims that America is falling behind in digital infrastructure development, the reality is quite the opposite: the United States continues to dominate globally in the deployment and operation of large-scale data center capacity..