Eli Lilly’s Goochland $5B plant to benefit region and beyond

A pharmaceutical hub is rapidly developing in Central Virginia, and Goochland County is poised to reap the benefits thanks to a $5 billion investment by Eli Lilly & Co. The manufacturing plant coming to West Creek Business Park, announced in September 2025, is part of the company’s effort to bolster its domestic medicine production and is projected to create 650 permanent jobs and support 1,800 construction jobs. When completed within the next three to five years, the plant will generate active pharmaceutical ingredients for cancer, autoimmune and other advanced therapies across 200,000 square feet of production space.

“It’s a combination of two special kinds of medicine: one to guide, say, a chemotherapy just to cancer cells, and then the therapy itself to kill the cancer cell,” Eli Lilly Chair and CEO David A. “Dave” Ricks said at a news conference in September. “That sort of combination medicine is at the cutting edge of science we have today, and we’re building that right here.”

The announcement was “exciting, fantastic and a great opportunity for Goochland,” says Sara Worley, Goochland’s deputy county administrator of community and economic development.

“Each manufacturing job will support multiple positions in other related industries,” she explains, “like supply chains and logistics and retail, which really dovetails nicely with some other projects that we have going on in the West Creek area.”

The business park is also home to Fortune 500 used car retailer CarMax’s headquarters and a campus for Fortune 100 credit card giant Capital One Financial. It also falls within the county’s technology overlay district and its technology zone, which were established in November 2025 to guide growth and incentivize investment via building permit and utility fee reimbursements. The largely identical territories stretch from Interstate 64 to Patterson Avenue in the county’s East End.

Similarly, incentives like a $130 million Major Employment and Investment grant (subject to General Assembly approval) helped lure the company.

In its project announcement, Lilly pointed to the “workforce potential in the Greater Richmond region, local incentives, ready access to utilities and transportation and favorable zoning.” Ricks himself noted in September that Virginia was chosen “because we have learned we have reliable partners here and great people who turn commitments into results.”

In making its decision, Eli Lilly is joining other pharmaceutical titans that chose to invest in Virginia in 2025. In Albemarle County, AstraZeneca says it is spending $4.5 billion to build two facilities, and Merck & Co. is planning a $3 billion manufacturing facility in Rockingham County. The trio joins other pharmaceutical companies that have already settled in the region, like nonprofit drugmaker Civica Rx in Petersburg and manufacturer Phlow in Richmond.

None of those investments would be possible, however, without the work of the Alliance for Building Better Medicine, a cluster of researchers and manufacturers formed about six years ago to meet a national need for quality, affordable essential medicines. The effort has attracted millions of dollars of public and private investment, as well as a federal Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Tech Hub designation that opened the Richmond and Petersburg region to further federal funding.

“Without all of that work … there is no way Lilly would have thought of Virginia when they went after these big projects,” says Joy Polefrone, the alliance’s executive director. The fact that Virginia could attract such a project is “crazy” to consider, she continues, adding,“I don’t think that could have existed as a thought in someone’s mind five years ago.”

Polefrone adds that the rapid rise of Virginia’s pharmaceutical cluster could serve as a model for its other industries, such as shipbuilding, aerospace engineering and artificial intelligence.

“This is one of these examples where it’s a big deal for Virginia,” says Robby Demeria, alliance board chair and Phlow’s chief corporate affairs officer. “And we’re not really used to saying that in the economic development world, that all these things that are happening — wherever they’re happening in the commonwealth — it’s for the betterment of all Virginians. And it’s something that I think is a really impressive, intentional shift in focus of how we think about cluster-building that we probably didn’t appreciate on day one in 2020.”