Global foreign direct investment rose by around 6% in 2025 to roughly $1.6 trillion, according to UN Trade and Development’s World Investment Report 2026, ending two years of decline. On the surface, that reads as a genuine recovery. Look closer at where the money actually went, and the picture is far more uneven.

## A Recovery That Isn’t Evenly Shared

Inflows to developed economies grew significantly faster than flows to developing economies in 2025, according to UNCTAD’s figures, with the gap between the two widening rather than closing. The world’s top twenty host economies attracted the large majority of global FDI last year, a concentration that UNCTAD explicitly flags as a recurring theme running through the report: investment is increasingly clustering in a narrower set of countries, sectors and individual projects, rather than spreading broadly across the global economy.

## Strategic Sectors Are Pulling Investment Toward Themselves

A large part of this concentration is sector-driven. Strategic industries such as AI infrastructure, semiconductors, critical minerals and energy-transition technology accounted for a substantially larger share of global greenfield project value in 2025 than they did five years earlier, per UNCTAD, with data centres in particular driving much of that growth. Lower-income economies, by contrast, captured only a small fraction of investment in these strategic sectors over the same period, even as they held a more typical share of investment overall.

## What This Means for Market Entry Decisions

For a business considering international expansion, this points to a more selective environment than a simple headline growth number suggests. The countries and sectors attracting capital are becoming more specific, and a market that looked attractive on aggregate FDI data two or three years ago may not be where the current momentum actually sits. Cross-border M&A and financial-centre flows also drove a meaningful share of the 2025 increase, which means underlying, ground-level investment activity is more modest than the headline figure implies.

## The Practical Takeaway

None of this changes the basic case for cross-border expansion. It does argue for treating aggregate FDI figures as a starting point rather than a conclusion, and pairing that macro picture with relationships and market intelligence specific to the sector and country in question. A market can be attracting significant capital in aggregate while still being a poor fit for a particular business’s product, sector or stage, and the reverse is equally true.

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