Florida Policy & Regulation 

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.

By the early 1950s, the United States produced nearly half of the world's steel. Few industries appeared more secure. Fewer still imagined that America's dominance could ever meaningfully decline. Yet history had other plans. Today, the United States occupies a remarkably similar position in artificial intelligence. America's technology companies lead the development of frontier AI models. Its cloud providers operate much of the world's advanced computing infrastructure.

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..