Atlanta, Georgia, began life as a train terminus in the 1830s. In some ways it has not moved far from these roots, although these days it is a hub more representative of the modern era. It is home to the world’s busiest airport by passenger seats, with 62.7mn filled in 2024, according to flight database OAG. Despite being inland, its freight capabilities are extensive, with a rail and road logistics centre located near the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Fulton County providing connectivity to the sea via the Port of Savannah, one of the US’s fastest-growing ports.
Atlanta is not just about transport. It is home to the headquarters of several multinational companies, the most recognisable of which is Coca-Cola, created in Atlanta in 1886. Other younger but no less storied US institutions also call Atlanta home: Home Depot opened its first two stores there in 1979 and CNN has been based in the city since 1980, while Delta Air Lines relocated there in 1941 and UPS in 1991. It has a strong presence in the fintech sector, hosting the US headquarters of financial transaction processing companies such as First Data and Global Payments, as well as Equifax, the credit reporting company, and several cryptocurrency and blockchain businesses. It is also the home of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters and a burgeoning health and life sciences sector which accounted for the lion’s share of employment growth in 2024.
The Metropolitan Statistical Area consists of 29 counties, of which Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Gwinnett cluster around the centre and make up the core. Proximity to Atlanta’s transportation hubs and a state that is business-friendly have encouraged inward relocations. Low taxes, bipartisan support for commerce and a skilled workforce all make Georgia a popular state.
In terms of size, Atlanta’s population is neck and neck with that of Miami, with just over 6.4mn inhabitants in 2024 ranking it in the top two of south-eastern metropoles and eighth in the US. Given its strategic location and transportation advantages, Atlanta MSA is the largest economy in the region, estimated at $571bn in 2023.
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The hub is being transformed, with billions of dollars of investment going into projects to regenerate and upgrade the MSA’s housing and infrastructure provision. Among these, Bowen Homes’ transformation project aims to provide mixed-income housing, as well as retail and community spaces, in a historic housing site in Atlanta’s north-west.
In downtown Atlanta, adjacent to the city’s major sporting stadium and the Centennial Olympic Park, the Centennial Yards project will redevelop 50 acres over the coming five years to provide residential, retail and commercial space, as well as hotel rooms and entertainment venues.
A history of foreign investment
Between 2020 and the end of 2024, Atlanta has attracted $14.8bn into 234 foreign direct investment projects, with a further $382mn and 15 projects in the five months to the end of May 2025, based on data from FT Locations, fDi Markets. According to the Mayor’s Office of International and Immigrant Affairs (MOIIA), 2,700 foreign companies operate in Atlanta’s metro area. These include Mercedes-Benz, Siemens and Thyssenkrupp.
South Korean businesses have a particularly strong presence based on a long history of association with the state. In 1985, Georgia set up a trade office in Seoul, a decade later welcoming its first South Korean investment from SKC, a subsidiary of South Korea’s SK Group, which built a polyester films plant in Covington, just inside the Atlanta MSA, in 1996. In 2022 the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency, Kotra, opened a new office in Atlanta, the organisation’s eighth in the US. This may have come under strain from the recent immigration confrontation in Georgia, but the pull for South Korean investors and the need for investment remain strong, illustrated by the efforts of both sides to try to find a diplomatic solution.
Companies affiliated with SK Group have continued to expand in and around Atlanta. SK Battery America built its first plant in Georgia in 2019, just outside the Atlanta MSA. SKC’s subsidiary Absolics, which makes chip substrates, is expanding at SKC’s Covington facility. SK On and Hyundai Motor Group in 2022 announced they would be building an EV battery facility in Bartow County, with production expected in the second half of 2025.
Together, South Korean companies have accounted for the creation of 8,469 jobs in the MSA since 2020, the highest of any foreign investing country, but others are also feeling the draw. German and Japanese businesses each account for the creation of nearly half as many jobs as South Korean ones in the past five years. Last year Lee Kum Kee, the Hong Kong-based sauce and condiment maker, said it would invest $288mn in a new factory expected to create 267 roles.
Atlanta’s ties are not only to Asia. It has extensive international connections, hosting more than 70 foreign consulates and trade offices from Albania to Zambia. A further dozen offices are present in Atlanta purely to deal with trade relationships, while 30 binational chambers of commerce assist members in developing business contacts and commercial relations.
Diverse cultural scene
Atlanta is one of the less diverse cities we have featured so far when it comes to the proportion of the population born overseas. While still ahead of national averages, just 16 per cent of its people were born outside the US. Still, relatively more of those that were born overseas come from further afield — while 46 per cent came from Latin America, as many as one-third were born in Asia, testament to the ties the city has to countries such as South Korea. Ethnically, Atlanta’s largest group is white, at 42 per cent, with the Black population accounting for one-third overall.
According to the MOIIA, its immigrant population amounts to nearly 850,000, or nearly 14 per cent of the total. Their contribution is significant both in terms of tax revenue and entrepreneurial enterprise.
With the seventh-highest Korean population among US cities and so many South Korean businesses, there is a strong representation of Korean fare. Spread through north-east Atlanta, the city’s Korean establishments are hard to describe as one concentrated Koreatown, but the heart of it lies in Gwinnett County, hailed as “Seoul of the South”, where there is food and culture to sample, as well as tours and festivals. Readers can also get their local news in Korean via the ChoSun Daily News Atlanta and K-pop bands frequently include the city on their tours.
There are headline music events for fans beyond K-pop. By the end of 2025, Atlanta will have had visits from Beyoncé, Post Malone and Shakira, among others. Recognised as a centre for hip hop in the US, it hosts annual festivals A3C and One Musicfest. In an FT feature, Sean Bankhead, the Atlanta-based American dancer and choreographer who has worked with Beyoncé and other leading names, highlights his hometown’s cultural excellence in areas from its dance scene to food and parks. The latter are also widely appreciated: Atlanta is sometimes described as a “city in a forest” due to its abundance of trees, unusual for most US cities.
Sometimes referred to as “Black Hollywood” or “Hollywood of the South”, it has a significant presence in film, hosting an annual international festival in April and May. Attractive tax breaks, varied locations and a critical mass of talent have lured productions such as Black Panther and three of the four Hunger Games films, as well as shows from The Vampire Diaries, filmed shortly after the tax breaks were enacted in 2008, and Stranger Things. It is home to Tyler Perry Studios, creator of the Netflix hit The Six Triple Eight, which the actor founded in Atlanta in 2006.
Holding the Olympics in 1996 put Atlanta on the sporting stage and it is due to return to the spotlight during the 2026 Fifa World Cup. It will host eight of that tournament’s matches, including a semi-final, at the landmark Mercedes-Benz Stadium. While Atlanta’s only major regular international event these days is the PGA Tour Championship, the final event of the golf tour’s FedExCup Playoffs, the city has plenty of regular domestic sport. Its football team, the Atlanta Falcons, has been in residence since 1965 and the Atlanta Braves baseball team has won numerous National League pennants as well as the World Series four times. Based in Atlanta since 1968 its NBA team the Hawks has also had some historical success.
The city is home to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and its Atlanta Ballet is the longest continually performing ballet company in the US. Atlanta also hosts a number of annual festivals, including the Design Festival in September/October. The birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr, it has several major museums, including the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (closed until autumn 2025 for expansion), the Fernbank Museum of Natural History and the High Museum of Art.
Atlanta is no slouch when it comes to eating out, either. Its homegrown food scene serves everything from soul food and barbecue to high-end dining, with nine Michelin-starred restaurants.
Strong scientific background
While Atlanta did not make the top-10 in the Investing in America Index 2025, the MSA topped the charts in the workforce and talent category as the only city to score 100 points out of 100.
Its population skews slightly younger than the average US city, with a median age of 37.6 (39.2 across the US) and nearly two-thirds of its population is in the working age range of 18 to 64. Just over 90 per cent of the population has graduated from at least high school, about the same as the overall rate in the US, but a greater proportion of these have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The city’s population is also forecast to grow strongly between 2020 and 2050 and is set to outpace employment, according to Atlanta Regional Commission data, thus providing a larger workforce pool for potential employers.
With two nationally respected institutions of higher education in the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, both of which rank in the top 40 colleges in America according to US News rankings, the city has a strong higher education system, especially in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects. These graduates can expect a robust market for their skills: WalletHub ranks Atlanta fourth out of 100 US cities for Stem jobs. Georgia State University is the MSA’s largest, with over 50,000 students and is ranked top for its undergraduate teaching among the nation’s public universities.
Perhaps due to the pool of Stem graduates, while an employer can expect to pay a bit more for their workers in Atlanta than in the US on average, tech workers are slightly cheaper in Atlanta than elsewhere in the States. In May 2024, the annual mean wage for all occupations in Atlanta was $70,150, compared with the US national mean of $67,920. Within that, operations, marketing and human resources managers all receive above average levels while computer and information systems managers, software developers and web developers are paid between 2 and 10 per cent below the national mean. It is anything from 10 to 25 per cent cheaper to hire such individuals in Atlanta than it is in New York (of these occupations, only web developers earn more in Atlanta than in the US’s financial capital).
Reflective of the city’s middle class Black community, historically Black colleges Morehouse and Spelman are also well ranked. Liberal arts focused Spelman ranks 40th nationally and has been the number one Historically Black College or University in the US for nearly two decades, while Morehouse ranks 95th and fifth, respectively.
There remain the usual problems with the public school system experienced in any large urban centre: inequality and broadly lower than average scores in basic proficiencies versus the state as a whole; a mismatch of supply with demand for places; and funding shortages within the system. Three-quarters of public high school students are Black, well above the proportion within the MSA, while just 16 per cent are Caucasian, and graduation rates in the Black and Hispanic student body are lower than for Caucasians.
To start to address these issues, Atlanta Public Schools reorganised and realigned its school districts between 2015 and 2020, resulting in a higher graduation rate in 2019. A 2022 plan to rezone to match capacity with the population was met with resistance, although in August 2025 the authority said that a degree of reorganisation was inevitable. Some of the MSA’s other school authorities, however, provide excellent educational institutions. Gwinnett County Public Schools high schools rank highly in Georgia, as do several in Forsyth County Schools and Fulton County Schools districts.
When it comes to international schools, there are a handful of multilingual offerings for children up to grade 12. These cover education in languages from French, German, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese to Albanian. The largest private school by student number is Woodward Academy, popular with expats for its diversity and student resources. Atlanta International School is smaller by the same measure but has representation of more than 90 nationalities speaking 60 languages.
Well-connected overseas
The city is well connected via its international airport, Hartsfield-Jackson, which services 160 domestic as well as more than 80 international destinations, including direct flights to cities in countries as distant as Japan. It has five daily flights to London, direct flights to Manchester and Edinburgh in the UK and other major EU destinations as well as Johannesburg and Seoul. As described, it has good freight rail connectivity and is a distribution hub for the south-east, as well as having access to the Port of Savannah.
As with most US cities, its public transport could be better. According to Geotab, the average car commute is 35 minutes while the average commute by public transport is 53 minutes. This is inconvenient for the 10 per cent of residents who do not own a car. The rail lines of its metro system, Marta, cover north, south, east and west axes as well as the north-east, with anything in between served by bus routes. While the 50-year-old system was scheduled to undergo meaningful expansion from 2016, this has since been scaled back due to pandemic-related delays and a lack of funds. These are now focused on upgrading existing facilities such as adding bus lines and new stations to current rail lines, rather than on expanding the service.
More locally, the MSA has neighbourhoods that are walkable, even while the city is not highly pedestrian-friendly overall. Walk Score, which ranks urban areas for walkability, gives Atlanta city proper, which is mostly in Fulton County, 48 points out of 100. This places it 23rd out of large US cities, but it remains car dependent. While there are “some transit options”, it gets a transit score of just 44. Getting out in a large city is always challenging, however, and the city at least ranks fourth among the best cities for recreation in the US, according to WalletHub.
While electricity costs are lower in Georgia than the US average across states, much of the public infrastructure is ageing, with increasingly extreme temperatures adding to issues with roads, bridges and rail networks. Atlanta’s urbanisation has overwhelmed the drainage system, and its outdated system has experienced burst supply pipes, sewage overflows, sinkholes and spills as recently as May this year. Meanwhile on the electricity front, a 2021 heatwave caused outages across the area.
Improvements are in the works. Georgia Power is investing in underground lines and smart grid technology. In July 2025 the company announced an Integrated Resource Plan to expand transmission infrastructure, increase renewable generation and enhance storage capacity, all of which should make supply for urbanites more resilient and reliable. The woeful under-investment in the water system is also being tackled — in March 2025 the city’s authorities announced a $2bn investment over the coming 20 years to replace its water infrastructure.
Incentives and costs for businesses
To attract foreign investors, Atlanta has two regional EB-5 centres — agencies that work towards stimulating the US economy by encouraging foreign capital investment in US-based business and job creation, based on certain eligibility criteria, in exchange for a green card.
Atlanta and the Port of Savannah together form one of Georgia’s three Foreign Trade Zones where businesses can benefit from duty referrals, reduced import taxes and lower administrative burdens (for instance weekly import filings rather than on each shipment entry).
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says that incentives for the $4bn-$5bn Hyundai and SK EV battery operation alone could have amounted to $641mn in the form of local property tax breaks, state tax credits, a grant to build a water plant, job training and regional economic business assistance grants. The project is expected to create 3,750 jobs with an average salary of $53,000.
Several bodies are available for incomers to tap into to help with navigating the commercial landscape. Invest Atlanta, Atlanta Regional Commission, ATLinBusiness, Welcoming Atlanta (run by the Mayor’s Office of International and Immigrant Affairs) and Metro Atlanta Chamber, to name just a few. Counties within the MSA also have promotion bodies such as Select Fulton, which covers much of Atlanta City. These organisations can help with advice on areas from tax incentives, site selection services, funding with grants and bonds and workforce training and employment placement. Gwinnett and Bartow counties offer similar resources.
Despite its apparent diversity, the city ranks poorly on income inequality, with the worst divide between rich and poor in the US, according to a 2024 study from GOBankingRates based on US Census Bureau data.
Average income for the bottom fifth of the population was just over $11,000, while the top fifth earned an average of $384,000. Notwithstanding the city’s reputation for having a flourishing Black middle class, the Black population on average is well behind on wealth generation — even more so than the average disparity in the nation.
While the costs associated with living in Atlanta are lower than other major US cities such as New York, house prices have risen and the gap between the income required for home ownership and the actual median income is near record highs, according to the Atlanta Fed. Nearly two-thirds of resident respondents to the 2024 Metro Atlanta Speaks Survey said they could not afford to move to another dwelling in their current neighbourhood.
As with many other US cities, the residents’ survey highlights the economy and crime as the top two issues for the populace. Jobs, they say, are hard to find and nearly one-third feel financially worse off than they were a year ago.
Spotlight
When Rick van Nostrand arrived to work in Atlanta in 1999, it was a city of 2mn people. Originally from Oklahoma, van Nostrand, the chief investment officer at Cornerstone Investment Partners, says: “I did not expect to stay in Atlanta one bit.” But he loved it. He describes the locals then as “the original kind of Atlantan people”, he says, “people who wore seersucker suits” and spoke in a “very pronounced and very distinguished way”. Since then, the MSA has grown to be a city of nearly 7mn people where, evidently, most of whom are no longer “from” Atlanta. And as it has grown, he says. “What is beautiful is that it is one of the most multi-ethnic large cities in America.”
Atlanta already had a large African-American community with a burgeoning middle class unusual in many US cities. This diversity has been augmented by arrivals from all over the world who can find a more integrated society than is often the case elsewhere. International newcomers with children are well catered for by Atlanta International School, where van Nostrand sent his children and whose community his own bilingual family (his wife is from Panama) found tremendously supportive.
The rapid growth and the influx of arrivals manifest in the fabric of the city. Rather than one large, planned conurbation, it has sprung up as a “city of neighbourhoods”. This has not been at the expense of public green space, however. Former president Jimmy Carter established protections for a 48-mile stretch of the Chattahoochee River where it flows through Atlanta and helped create the Martin Luther King Jr National Historical Park, after one of the city’s most famous sons. This abundance of state parks gives the city its occasional moniker of “the city under the trees”.
The village feel works well for those with the ability to structure their lives around the layout — living and working in the same area, for instance — but is more problematic for those that must travel across town. It is, van Nostrand says, “not well interconnected” across the neighbourhoods. Public transport and the road system has bottlenecks due to its organic and rapid expansion. These are hard to resolve within the existing layout, although the city is trying, with planned extensions to the Marta transit lines and widening of the highways which converge in the city.
In other areas new development has made a difference. The biggest impact that van Nostrand has observed so far has been in mixed-use development “rail to trail” beltway areas. The Old Fourth Ward, which abuts Downtown Atlanta, has gone from “destitute” to “exploding” with interesting restaurants and activities.
There is more regeneration coming across the central parts of Atlanta. Van Nostrand is particularly enthused by the possibilities presented by a recent $80mn gift to Georgia State University from the foundation established by Robert W Woodruff, the long-serving president of Coca-Cola. The opportunity for the university to expand its campus and become a more integrated hub could breathe new life into the heart of Atlanta, van Nostrand believes, turning the school from a “commuter school” to a “centre of mass for downtown”.
“Cities need universities within them because of the energy it provides, having young people . . . who are involved in their community.”
