Lilly breaks ground on $5 billion Virginia plant as pharma hiring race builds

Eli Lilly broke ground Thursday on a $5 billion drug manufacturing plant in Goochland County, just west of Richmond, a project that has more than doubled in investment since it was first pitched and is already hiring for a facility that is not expected to make medicine until 2030. The company has filled between 15 and 30 local construction-management roles, a spokesperson told Virginia Business, and Edgardo Hernandez, Lilly's president of manufacturing operations, said more than 20 offers are outstanding.

Lilly says the site will create 650 permanent jobs, which it describes as high-wage roles for engineers, scientists, operations personnel and lab technicians. It also expects about 1,800 construction jobs as the facility is built and brought online. In September 2025, Gov. Glenn Youngkin's office said Lilly's earlier plans called for a $2.148 billion investment and 468 jobs, Virginia Business reported. At the ceremony, Gov. Abigail Spanberger said the company had "more than doubled" the investment. The job commitment rose too, but to 650, not to double the original count.

The site will have an unusually broad mandate. It will be Lilly's first site to produce both active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished medicines in one integrated facility, the company said. Its main products will be antibody-drug conjugates, cancer treatments that pair an antibody with a potent cell-killing drug. Lilly says machine learning, AI, digitally integrated systems and data analytics will run throughout the site, "with digital automation embedded throughout the site to streamline operations." Goochland is one of 10 U.S. manufacturing sites Lilly has announced since 2020 and one of five that will make active ingredients. All of them fall under a domestic manufacturing push the company puts at more than $50 billion.

The schedule is tight. "From groundbreaking to making medicine, we usually take five years in this kind of facility," Hernandez told reporters. "Our goal is actually to make medicine in 2030, so we are planning to go fast and get there as quick as possible." He said a monoclonal antibody facility is planned to open in 2030. A drug product facility, where Lilly will fill vials, label and package, is planned for 2031. Plans Lilly filed with the county describe a 600,000-square-foot first phase and a later 340,000-square-foot expansion, according to Richmond BizSense. A spokesperson separately told Virginia Business that Lilly does not make the square footage of its facilities public, for safety reasons. Construction is expected to finish by 2030, WWBT reported, and commissioning and regulatory approvals will still be needed before full manufacturing begins.

Some early obstacles have been cleared. Dominion Energy received approval for a $98 million transmission line and substation running 6.5 miles to the West Creek site, according to Richmond BizSense. Lilly is also the first company to break ground on a major project inside Goochland's recently created technology overlay district, which Richmond BizSense describes as controversial. Advanced manufacturing is allowed by right in the district. A planned 900-megawatt data center campus nearby still needs a conditional use permit.

The state is betting on a training pipeline. Lilly has committed $40 million to the Virginia Center for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, a statewide network of industry, government and colleges. The network will include a pilot-scale, hands-on training center in Goochland County, with a targeted opening in 2028. AstraZeneca and Merck each committed $40 million to the same effort under a memorandum of understanding announced in October 2025, Virginia Business reported. WWBT reported that the training is meant to include people who have never worked in the industry. "The jobs being created by this project, they will need to be filled, and they need to be filled by Virginians," Spanberger said.

Those same partners are also competing with Lilly for workers. AstraZeneca is investing $4.5 billion in two plants in Albemarle County, and Site Selection reported that one of them will support its antibody-drug conjugate cancer portfolio, the same type of drug Lilly will make in Goochland. The two Albemarle plants are expected to create 600 jobs. Merck's $3 billion expansion in Elkton, which includes active-ingredient and drug-product operations, is expected to add 500 positions, according to the same report. BioBuzz reported that AstraZeneca projects production by 2029 and that Merck's project could be finished that year. It also cited Cardinal News, drawing on IBISWorld data, as counting fewer than 1,900 Virginia workers in brand-name pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The training center may help build a local pipeline. The immediate start-up problem is different. Chris Frew, who runs the life sciences recruiting firm Workforce Genetics as well as BioBuzz, wrote that "the experienced leaders and technical specialists needed to start up a plant of this size will largely have to be recruited into the region." Lilly's own site head, Eric Arocho, came to the project from New Jersey.