Dave Ricks, Chair and CEO of Lilly, said: “What makes this site unique is that it will bring [active pharmaceutical ingredient] production together with finished medicines, so it will literally run the whole process here at Richmond, and that’s new for Lilly — the first for us.”
The work is split across two buildings. Edgardo Hernandez, Executive Vice President and President of Manufacturing Operations for Lilly, said the company expects a monoclonal antibody facility to open in 2030, followed in 2031 by a drug product facility, “where we make the vials, the labeling, the packaging to send it straight to patients”.
Speaking to reporters, Hernandez said: “From groundbreaking to making medicine, 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.”
A spokesperson said Lilly keeps the floor area of its facilities private for safety reasons, while Hernandez said the buildings will be “multistory”. At the project’s announcement in Richmond in September 2025, Ricks put the production area at more than 200,000 sq ft, excluding offices and other space.
Eric Arocho is site head of the Goochland facility and will also be Lilly’s most senior executive in Virginia.
So far the company has recruited somewhere between 15 and 30 people locally for construction management roles, a spokesperson said. Hernandez said more than 20 job offers are currently out.
The $5 billion budget is more than twice the size of Lilly’s first proposal. In September 2025, Governor Glenn Youngkin’s office said the earlier plans had called for a $2.148 billion investment and 468 jobs.
Spanberger pointed to that smaller figure on 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.”
Virginia’s pharmaceutical manufacturing sector has expanded rapidly after years of preparation. In October 2025, a month after Lilly’s announcement, AstraZeneca said it would spend $4.5 billion on two facilities in Albemarle County, and Merck & Co. announced plans for a $3 billion manufacturing facility in Elkton.
Lilly, AstraZeneca and Merck have each pledged $40 million towards a workforce training centre for advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing in Central Virginia. The three joined a memorandum of understanding with the state government and several Virginia colleges and universities, announced in late October 2025.
Lilly’s release names the initiative the Virginia Center for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and says the network will include a pilot-scale, hands-on training centre in Goochland County. Ricks said on Thursday that the centre is aiming to open in 2028.
Ricks said: “We’re really excited about being a part of this new effort as Virginia seeks to become a hub for biopharmaceutical manufacturing globally.”
Lilly describes the Virginia plant as part of a nationwide drive to raise its domestic pharmaceutical output. Its capital spending commitments since 2020 exceed $50 billion, and over that period it has unveiled plans for 10 new US manufacturing sites.
Goochland is one of five of those sites that will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients. The others are in Huntsville, Alabama, Houston, Texas, and two in Lebanon, Indiana.
Spanberger said: “This project puts Virginia at the center of a broader effort to make more critical medicines here in the United States of America to strengthen our domestic pharmaceutical supply chain and to ensure that we are creating the highly skilled workforce that comes with advanced manufacturing.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic and the drug shortages that followed it, bringing pharmaceutical production back to the US became a priority, first for the Trump administration in its first term and then for the Biden administration. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was among those at Thursday’s ceremony.
Greer said producing APIs and building them into medicines on US soil “is a win not just for the health of Americans, but for the national security of our country. Americans should feel more secure knowing that pharmaceutical investments like this are going up across the country.”
The Goochland site is targeting Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification, according to Lilly.
