Three years in, and the Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation seems to be making good on turning Atlanta into one of the nation’s top five tech hubs.
The Atlanta Tech Hub unveiled its 2025 Impact Report at the official “State of the ATL Tech Ecosystem” with fanfare. “Hamilton” costumes, movie stars and high-dollar data showed a picture of the city’s wide-ranging tech “ecosystem” as it heads into another year.
Since its inception three years ago, the tech hub has mobilized over $37 million in investments. It supported companies as they added 1,155 new hires and generated almost $70 million in salaries, all with a team of four people.
“Atlanta has all the ingredients on the table to bake a really great cake, and the 2025 Impact Report shows that our ecosystem’s flywheel is officially spinning,”Atlanta Tech Hub head and Senior Technology Advisor Donnie Beamer said.
The Atlanta Tech Hub supported 146 companies in 2025, and the city has committed $85 million in city pension capital to private equity and venture capital. In the next 12 months, the report predicts 92% of supported companies will hire more.
“We are building an ecosystem of jobs where folks growing up in Atlanta can aspire to get these roles and have a truly substantial life by getting on the pathway to technology,” Mayor Andre Dickens said.
But what is Atlanta’s tech ecosystem, exactly?
At the April 1 event, Beamer, dressed in a costume from the Broadway hit show “Hamilton,” painted a picture. The tech ecosystem is Waymo and robotic food delivery. The tech ecosystem is immersive entertainment like Cosm. The tech ecosystem is even popular anime conventions like MomoCon.
The tech hub’s challenge is making all of this into one cohesive idea for the tech world to latch on to. Beamer thinks it comes down to stories. He pointed to Alexander Hamilton, a once “obscure” founding father turned historical icon thanks to the help of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pen and “a little storytelling.”
“That’s what we want to do for Atlanta,” Beamer said.
The state of tech event explored how storytelling could help Atlanta become a top-five tech hub by looking at some of the state’s other booming industries. One panel looked at the film and entertainment world as a roadmap for tech.
“Entertainment was not on anybody’s radar,” Beamer said, referring to the industry before the tax credit was enacted and expanded in 2008. But statewide financial support helped the industry boom.
Today, Georgia is a $4.4 billion global production hub. It’s a climb from the early days of local, niche productions. Part of it is commitment.
Atlanta Film and Entertainment Office Liaison Cardellia Hunter said the city is one of the “number one film offices” thanks to ongoing investment.
“Our office is the one-stop shop where we can move productions around through all of our stakeholders, which is something that we really take pride in,” Hunter said.
But Beamer thinks it also comes down to storytelling. It presents a challenge and an opportunity for the tech industry.
“Tech is so many things,” Beamer said.
While entertainment is easy to grasp — movies, film and branded content — tech is wide-ranging. People have different opinions about it. Waymo can spur one reaction, while ChatGPT can spark another.
Beamer said there is no “one size fits all” approach to telling the tech story. But it creates an opportunity to tailor to each person’s interests, whether it’s immersive entertainment or artificial intelligence used to help with city operations.
It’s a “better dialogue,” Beamer said, to sell people on the things they could need. And the stories can help the tech-hub mission get more attention.
“We are focused on connecting our founders to the true lifeblood of business: talent, capital and customers,” Beamer said. “By investing directly in our next generation of builders, we are ensuring that anyone can build and scale their dream right here in their own backyard.”
Atlanta is increasingly a town for people who don’t know better. It is the opposite of a place like NY, where words don’t matter, actions do. Atlanta is trying to live in the unreality of its reality – a large regional town with light global connections. Not a top in anything. All the best to it, but no thanks to that level of denial.