News | 4 min read
Eli Lilly breaks ground on $5B Virginia manufacturing site
October 26, 2026
Eli Lilly & Co. ceremonially broke ground on its $5 billion Greater Richmond manufacturing facility Thursday.
Announced in September 2025, the site is expected to create 1,800 temporary construction roles and 650 permanent jobs once complete.
“This is a success for Virginia,” Gov. Abigail Spanberger said. “This is a success for Lilly. This is a success for Lilly’s future employees. … But importantly, it is a success for the patients that will someday benefit from the medicines that will be made right here in this community.”
The facility will produce antibody drug conjugates, which provide targeted cancer treatment by combining monoclonal antibodies designed to attach to tumors with chemotherapy drugs.
“What makes this site unique is that it will bring [active pharmaceutical ingredient] production together with finished medicines,” Lilly Chair and CEO Dave Ricks said, “so it will literally run the whole process here at Richmond, and that’s new for Lilly — the first for us.”
Lilly anticipates opening a monoclonal antibody facility in 2030 and a drug product facility — “where we make the vials, the labeling, the packaging to send it straight to patients” — in 2031, said Edgardo Hernandez, executive vice president and president of manufacturing operations for Lilly.
“From groundbreaking to making medicine,” he said to reporters, “we usually take five years in this kind of facility. Our goal is actually to make medicine in 2030, so we are planning to go fast and get there as quick as possible. As you know, there are patients waiting.”
According to a spokesperson, Lilly does not make public the square footage of its facilities for safety reasons. Regarding height, the buildings will be “multistory,” Hernandez said. During the September 2025 project announcement in Richmond, Ricks said the site’s production area will be more than 200,000 square feet, not including offices and other spaces.
Lilly purchased the project’s 227-acre site in the West Creek Business Park, located near the Henrico-Greater Richmond border, for $38.3 million in August. The beginnings of construction work on the site were visible Thursday, including a pile of earth and machines in the distance.
The Greater Richmond facility’s site head is Eric Arocho, who will also be Lilly’s highest-ranking executive in Virginia.
Locally, the company has hired somewhere between 15 and 30 people for construction management roles, according to a spokesperson. Lilly currently also has more than 20 offers out, Hernandez said.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office said in September 2025 that Lilly’s previous plans called for a $2.148 billion investment and 468 jobs.
Spanberger referenced the previous, smaller investment Thursday, saying, “It is worth remembering where this started, because the original plans that Lilly put forward called for a $2.1 billion investment, and they have more than doubled it.”
After years of groundwork, Virginia’s pharmaceutical manufacturing industry has exploded. In October 2025, the month following Lilly’s announcement date, AstraZeneca said it would invest $4.5 billion to build two facilities in Albemarle County, and Merck & Co. announced a planned $3 billion manufacturing facility in Elkton.
The three companies each committed $40 million to develop a workforce training center for advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing in Central Virginia, joining a memorandum of understanding with the state government and multiple Virginia colleges and universities that was announced in late October 2025.
The center is targeting a 2028 opening, Ricks said Thursday.
“We’re really excited about being a part of this new effort as Virginia seeks to become a hub for biopharmaceutical manufacturing globally,” he said.
The Virginia facility is part of Lilly’s nationwide push to increase its domestic pharmaceutical production. Since 2020, the company has committed more than $50 billion to capital projects and announced 10 new planned manufacturing sites, including the Greater Richmond project, which is one of five sites that will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients.
