Drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. intends to build a $5 billion manufacturing site in Goochland County, the company announced Tuesday, a potential big boost to the region’s budding pharmaceutical industry.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch first reported last month that state lawmakers had approved economic development packages for Eli Lilly to build a plant in Goochland and for AstraZeneca to construct one in Albemarle County.
Since the pandemic, local leaders have hoped greater Richmond — and other corners of the state — can become a destination for drug building. Eli Lilly’s announcement is an answer to their prayers.
“This is really awesome,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said. “I want to say, welcome to Virginia, Lilly. We’re so excited to have you.”
Lilly will need about three years to build the facility and possibly another two to gain regulatory approval, said David Ricks, the company’s CEO. The complex will create 650 jobs for engineers, scientists and other staffers, with an average salary around $100,000. Almost all will be filled by local employees. Building the installation will create an additional 1,800 short-term construction jobs.
The company will build the facility in the West Creek Business Park, across the street from Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, on a 227-acre parcel. In the 1990s, Motorola planned to build a semiconductor facility there. Workers constructed a parking lot and installed utility lines beneath the ground. Then, Motorola canceled the plan, citing a downturn in the global economy, and the parcel has been mostly empty ever since.
In 2005, insurance company Markel bought the property for $18 million. Lilly is in the process of purchasing it, a spokesperson for Lilly said, and Lilly hopes to begin site work in a matter of weeks. Lilly has not yet announced a general contractor or other construction partners.
Goochland leaders have long pitched the property as a site for economic development. In the spring, Tom Winfree, chair of the Goochland board of supervisors, flew with Youngkin to Indianapolis to make their pitch. Lilly selected Goochland from roughly 400 applications.
The company chose the site in part because of Virginia’s educated workforce — the state has reputable engineering schools and community college programs for pharmaceutical manufacturing, Ricks said in an interview. Because the area has other pharma companies, colleges know what students need to be prepared for the industry.
It also helped that greater Richmond is a desirable place to live, and the West Creek site is shovel ready, Ricks added. Having utility lines and sewer pipes built underground may not seem like much, but permitting for that kind of work takes months, he said.
Goochland plans to offer Lilly incentives, but the county’s board of supervisors still needs to approve them. Goochland already has two Fortune 500 companies headquartered within its borders, CarMax and Performance Food Group, and a large number of Capital One employees.
In the past two years, Goochland has worked to bring new businesses to its exurban and rural community. It has hired more firefighters, improved its roads and built a new elementary school. Earlier this year, Amazon announced it would build a fulfillment center on Ashland Road.
“This is huge for us,” said Jonathan Lyle, a member of the board whose district includes West Creek.
The Lilly facility will develop a type of medicine called antibody-drug conjugates, which is meant to treat cancer and other ailments without wreaking as much havoc as normal chemotherapy. With this type of medicine, a targeted protein drags the chemotherapy directly to the cancer cell and not other healthy cells, reducing the medicine’s side effects.
“This isn’t just another manufacturing site — it represents a significant milestone for Lilly as we begin building our first bioconjugate facility,” said Edgardo Hernandez, president of Lilly Manufacturing Operations.
This Goochland site is the first of four new U.S. manufacturing plants Lilly plans to announce this year.
Greater Richmond is home to a growing pharmaceutical industry, and it’s taken more than 10 years to get to this point, said Dr. Frank Gupton, who leads the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medicines for All Institute. In 2014, his organization won a $5 million grant from the Gates Foundation to redesign drugs with cheaper building blocks.
“It all mushroomed off that” $5 million grant, Gupton said.
After Medicines for All had proved that it could make drugs cheaper and with less waste, it attracted the attention of Civica Inc., a nonprofit drug maker that built a facility in Petersburg. Gupton’s other venture, Phlow Corp., won a federal contract during the pandemic to build a national stockpile of medicine ingredients.
Then last year, Danish drug company Novo Nordisk A/S bought a plant in Petersburg previously owned by Ampac Fine Chemicals. Now Eli Lilly is coming to Goochland, and AstraZeneca is expected to build in Albemarle County.
“Virginia has momentum,” Ricks said. “We want to be a part of that as well.”
During the pandemic, when supply lines were interrupted, international borders closed and some medical supplies became hard to obtain, Eli Lilly made the decision to outsource less and focus its efforts within U.S. borders. In February, the company said it would build four manufacturing sites in the U.S. if the government maintained a lower corporate tax rate.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed in 2017 in President Donald Trump’s first term, reduced the top corporate tax rate from 35% to a flat 21%. Then Trump’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” signed in July, continued the lower rate, which “helps catalyze this type of investment in the U.S.,” Ricks said.
Headquartered in Indianapolis, Lilly is one of the world’s largest medicine makers. It manufactures Mounjaro, which became hugely popular for its ability to aid weight loss, and Trulicity, a similar drug for treating diabetes.
© 2025 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.. Visit www.timesdispatch.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.