Lilly breaks ground on $5 billion Virginia plant with 650-job target

Eli Lilly broke ground Thursday on a $5 billion pharmaceutical plant in Goochland County, just west of Richmond, where it says it will employ 650 people. So far the local workforce is small. Lilly has hired between 15 and 30 people in the area for construction management roles, a company spokesperson told Virginia Business, and Edgardo Hernandez, the executive vice president who runs manufacturing operations, said more than 20 offers are outstanding. The bulk of the payroll is tied to buildings Lilly expects to open in 2030 and 2031.

The project has grown since it was first scoped. Lilly's earlier plans called for a $2.148 billion investment and 468 jobs, then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin's office said when the expanded project was announced in September 2025. The company now expects 650 permanent jobs, which it describes as engineers, scientists, operations personnel and lab technicians, along with about 1,800 construction jobs as the site is built. Lilly paid $38.3 million in August for the 227-acre parcel in the West Creek Business Park near the Henrico County line, and Eric Arocho, the site head, will be the company's highest-ranking executive in Virginia.

The Richmond site will be the first in Lilly's network to make both active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished medicines in one integrated facility, according to the company's announcement. It will produce antibody-drug conjugates, targeted cancer treatments that pair antibodies with cytotoxic drugs, and will carry dedicated ingredient capacity for bioconjugate and large-molecule medicines. Chair and CEO Dave Ricks told reporters that "it will literally run the whole process here at Richmond."

That process arrives in stages. Lilly plans to open a monoclonal antibody facility in 2030 and a drug product facility in 2031, "where we make the vials, the labeling, the packaging to send it straight to patients," Hernandez said, according to Virginia Business. "From groundbreaking to making medicine, we usually take five years in this kind of facility," he said. "Our goal is actually to make medicine in 2030, so we are planning to go fast."

Those 650 people will work in a heavily automated plant. Lilly says machine learning, AI, digitally integrated systems and data analytics will be used to drive "right-first-time execution," with digital automation embedded throughout the site.

Richmond is one of 10 U.S. manufacturing sites Lilly has announced since 2020 as part of a push it puts at more than $50 billion. Five will make active ingredients: Richmond; Huntsville, Alabama; Houston; and two sites in Lebanon, Indiana. Four will make injectable medicines and devices, in Research Triangle Park and Concord, North Carolina, Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. A tenth, also in Lebanon, will make genetic medicines.

The Houston plant offers a useful reference point for the staffing model. Lilly has begun construction there on a $6.5 billion facility expected to create about 600 permanent positions and roughly 4,000 construction jobs, Hernandez told Voz News this month. Houston was picked from 300 proposals submitted from 42 states, he said, and Lilly is working with San Jacinto Community College on two-year and certificate programs. "You don't need to have a college degree right now," he said of the openings there.

Virginia's version of that pipeline is shared. AstraZeneca said in October 2025 it would spend $4.5 billion on two facilities in Albemarle County, and Merck announced a planned $3 billion plant in Elkton, Virginia Business reported. Each of the three drugmakers committed $40 million to an advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing training center under a memorandum of understanding with the state and several Virginia colleges and universities. Lilly's announcement describes the effort as the Virginia Center for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, a statewide network that will include a pilot-scale, hands-on training center in Goochland County. Its targeted opening is 2028, two years before Lilly's first building is due to make medicine.

Reshoring drug production became a priority of the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration after pandemic-era shortages, Virginia Business noted. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who attended the groundbreaking, called domestic production of active ingredients "a win not just for the health of Americans, but for the national security of our country."