'Exciting Times For Houston': $6.5B Manufacturing Facility Confirmed
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly confirmed a monster manufacturing facility to be built in Northeast Houston with a bigger-than-expected price tag.
Eli Lilly and Co. will build a $6.5B synthetic medicine active pharmaceutical product facility in McCord Development’s Generation Park, the second of four new U.S. facilities Lilly expects to announce this year.
The site was chosen from more than 300 proposals and applications, Eli Lilly Chair and CEO Dave Ricks said at a press conference Tuesday.
“Onshoring this kind of production … will reduce our country’s reliance on foreign suppliers,” Ricks said. “[It] will shorten lead times for medicine to get to patients. This will ensure faster and more secure supply chains for life-changing medicines.”
Lilly’s announcement proves all the pieces are in place for Houston to be a powerhouse in the biomanufacturing ecosystem, Stream Realty Partners senior associate Zach Leger said.
“It’s exciting times for Houston,” he said. “This will be a massive capital project. It’ll bring lots of jobs, and there will be a lot of follow-on activity because of it.”
The project will have substantial economic impact, creating 4,000 construction jobs and another 615 permanent, high-wage jobs, Ricks said. Every $1 spent on the project is estimated to turn into $4 of economic impact, he said.
A Houston manufacturing investment from Eli Lilly has been rumored since it filed documents with the state comptroller in May about a $5.9B facility considered for a 236-acre tract in Generation Park.
Lilly chose Houston due to its innovative ecosystem, top-notch talent and infrastructure, including power and ability to move goods through Port Houston, Ricks said.
“Texas stood out for what it delivers to a modern manufacturing site like the one we’re building,” he said. “Texas offered speed and scale from blueprint to validation to production of medicines.”
The state gave Eli Lilly a $5.5M Texas Enterprise Fund grant and a $146M Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation award to help secure the investment, Gov. Greg Abbott said at Tuesday’s press conference.
The announcement is huge unto itself and boosts pharmaceutical manufacturing in Texas, but it is also of national strategic importance, Abbott said.
Federal incentives and pain from tariffs led to a renewed push to onshore manufacturing after decades of shipping it overseas. Houston has benefited in the form of major investment announcements from manufacturing giants, including Apple, Tesla and Nvidia. But the importance of onshoring medical manufacturing was spotlighted even earlier, Abbott said.
“We learned the hard way earlier this decade about being too reliant on other countries for the manufacture and supply of medicines and other medical supplies,” he said.
“It is a national security issue that we're dependent upon other countries. It is imperative … that we bring home to America the manufacture of all of our medicines and all of our medical supplies.”
The project is Lilly’s eighth domestic manufacturing facility investment since 2020, Ricks said. At the Houston site, the company will develop the first oral GLP-1 medication along with ingredients for other medicines, some that will be exported, he said.
GLP-1 medications are used to help manage blood sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes and increasingly for weight loss. Lilly’s oral, small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist, which it plans to submit to global regulatory agencies for obesity by the end of this year, would be the first GLP-1 offered in pill form, Ricks said.
