Against the backdrop of intensifying geopolitical conflicts and rising trade protectionism, global value chains (GVCs) are facing unprecedented risks of fragmentation and division. Managing and reducing the level of GVC risk exposure through effective policy tools has become an urgent issue to be addressed. Investment facilitation, as a core policy instrument for reducing institutional transaction costs and optimizing the business environment, exerts a profound influence on the cross-border production layout and localization process of foreign-invested enterprises in host countries. Through this channel, it reshapes the embedding patterns and risk structures of host countries’ participation in GVCs. In this context, this paper takes investment facilitation as the key policy variable and empirically examines its impact on the level of GVC risk exposure and explores the underlying mechanisms.Based on the 2024 Analytical Activity of Multinational Enterprises (AMNE) database released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this paper draws on the accounting frameworks of Li & Peng (2025) and Zhu et al. (2022). It decomposes GVC risk exposure into three components, namely supply-side, demand-side, and supply-demand two-way risk, based on a country’s (or sector’s) dependence on external upstream supply and external downstream demand. An indicator system is constructed, and the entropy method is adopted to measure the level of investment facilitation in 72 economies. The empirical results show that improving investment facilitation promotes the internalization of supply-side risk exposure to foreign markets, while curbing demand-side and two-way risk exposure. This effect operates mainly through three channels: raising the embeddedness of foreign capital on the supply side, reducing foreign trade exposure on the demand side, and enhancing the autonomy of domestic value chains in the two-way dimension. In addition, the impact of investment facilitation on GVC risk exposure exhibits heterogeneity across income levels and industries.Compared with existing literature, this paper makes two marginal contributions. First, based on input-output theory, it decomposes GVC risk exposure into three dimensions, namely supply-side, demand-side, and supply-demand two-way risk exposure, and establishes a more systematic theoretical analytical framework. Second, by further accounting for heterogeneity in firm ownership, this paper identifies additional risks exposed to domestic foreign-funded enterprises, explains the intrinsic mechanism of the positive effect of investment facilitation on supply-side risk exposure from the perspective of risk internalization, and clarifies the logical relationship between indicator improvements and the transformation of risk nature.This study reveals the role of investment facilitation as a risk converter, which helps transform uncontrollable external risks into internal risks that are measurable and manageable within the host country. Policymakers should implement targeted investment facilitation measures to guide foreign-invested enterprises in optimizing domestic industrial chain layouts and strengthen ex-post supervision so as to build a more resilient and competitive GVC embedding model.