The facility, which is part of Lilly’s $50 billion reshoring drive, will make obesity drugs such as tirzepatide and retatrutide when it starts operations in 2031.
Eli Lilly has committed $3.5 billion to build a manufacturing facility for injectable weight-loss therapies in Pennsylvania.
Work on the facility, the fourth new site announced as part of Lilly’s $50 billion reshoring drive, will start this year with the goal of the plant being operational in 2031. Lilly expects to employ 850 people at the plant and generate 2,000 construction jobs while the site is being built.
At a press conference about the investment, Lilly CEO Dave Ricks called the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania plant an “anchor point for our U.S. supply chain.” Ricks named tirzepatide and retatrutide as products that will be made at the site. Tirzepatide is a GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist that Lilly sells as Mounjaro and Zepbound. Retatrutide is a triple agonist that Lilly recently linked to deep weight-loss in a Phase III trial.
Ricks said the Lehigh Valley facility, like Lilly’s other new plants, will be a digitally integrated site that will last many decades. Lilly will ship products made at the Lehigh Valley plant across the U.S. and overseas, the CEO said.
Lilly selected Lehigh Valley as the location of the facility after putting out a request for information that received more than 300 responses. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said at the press conference that the state lost to another location in the competition for a Lilly site about six months ago. The setback led Shapiro and his colleagues to talk to Lilly about how to better position themselves for future deals.
Pennsylvania has committed more than $100 million to win Lilly’s investment. The company will receive $50 million in tax credits, a $25 million grant for site development and another $25 million grant under a Pennsylvania job creation initiative.
Shapiro said his team “worked aggressively to reform our permitting process and speed up government.” Lilly will spend “a whole lot less time waiting for permits and waiting for action,” Shapiro said. With colleagues now working with Lilly, the governor said his team aims to be “ready to deliver months ahead of schedule.”
As well as offering tax breaks and cutting red tape, the bid team leveraged the geographic advantages of the Lehigh Valley. Located near an interstate, Lilly’s Lehigh Valley facility will be within a day’s drive of one-third of the U.S. population. Lilly’s hiring plans are supported by the presence of 1.8 million people within a one-hour drive of the facility.
The Lehigh Valley facility is part of Lilly’s broader push to build U.S. capacity. Since 2020, Lilly has unveiled new sites in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, an expansion in Puerto Rico, and the acquisition and expansion of a plant in Wisconsin. Lilly also stepped up its reshoring plans last year in an effort to avoid tariffs that were threatened by President Donald Trump. The company touted a $27 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing.
