Indoor farms growing crops in stacked layers under artificial light have been built at scale. Several have also closed. The pattern of which ones survive is instructive.
What works
Leafy greens and herbs. Fast-growing, high-value per kilogram, sold fresh where transport time matters. A farm near a city producing lettuce that reaches the shelf the same day competes on quality and freshness, not on price.
What does not
Staple crops. Wheat, rice, maize and potatoes are cheap per kilogram and need a lot of light to produce calories. The electricity cost of growing them indoors exceeds their value by a wide margin, and no plausible improvement in lighting efficiency closes the gap.
Fruit trees, root vegetables, and anything that grows slowly or large. The economics scale with the ratio of value to growth time and space, and most crops fail that test.
The energy arithmetic
Sunlight is free. Replacing it with electricity is the entire cost problem, and every improvement in the technology is an improvement in how much light is needed per unit of crop.
Lighting efficiency has improved substantially and is approaching physical limits. The remaining lever is cheap electricity, which is why vertical farms increasingly co-locate with renewable generation.
What it is genuinely good for
Fresh produce in places that cannot grow it – cold climates, dense cities, arid regions. Consistent supply independent of weather. Reduced pesticide use because the environment is closed. And research on plant growth under controlled conditions.
The honest forecast
A permanent niche in high-value fresh produce near consumers. Not a replacement for field agriculture and never presented honestly as one by the operators who survived.