The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced on Tuesday that it will build a $6.5 billion facility in Texas, marking the company’s second multibillion-dollar U.S. investment this month.
The Indiana-based company announced in February that it would be making four distinct manufacturing investments in 2025 across the United States, with the goal of bringing 13,000 domestic jobs to the American economy. Eli Lilly recently announced the first of these investments, with plans to build a $5 billion manufacturing facility in Goochland County, Virginia, on Sept. 16.
Recommended Stories
- Megyn Kelly torches Jimmy Kimmel's return and his 'self-pity'
- Piers Morgan shreds Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Hard to feel sympathy for his crocodile tears’
- NewsNation hits record ratings during Charlie Kirk memorial, beating CNN and MSNBC
The facility in Texas will be dedicated to producing the company’s first GLP-1 pill, orforglipron, and is expected to bring 615 jobs to the Houston area. Eli Lilly’s CEO David A. Ricks said the Houston facility will help the company manufacture the pill “at scale.”
“This significant U.S. investment and onshoring of our API production capabilities will ensure faster, more secure access to orforglipron and to other life-changing medicines of the future,” Ricks said.
The Houston facility announcement, touted by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on X, follows other moves by Eli Lilly to align itself with the Trump administration. The company raised drug prices abroad to keep them lower in the United States in August, following a late-July letter from President Donald Trump to lower U.S. drug prices.
“Lilly supports the administration’s goal of keeping the United States the world’s leading destination for biopharmaceutical research and manufacturing, and the objective of more fairly sharing the costs of breakthrough medical research across developed countries,” the company said in an August statement.
In that same statement, the company took a hard stance against tariffs on pharmaceutical products, which Trump had warned of in the weeks before the company’s statement. Trump announced a trade agreement framework with the European Union that included up to a 15% import duty on pharmaceuticals on Aug. 21.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) touted Eli Lilly’s investment in the Lone Star State.
“Texas is proud to welcome Lilly to Houston as they make one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing investments in our nation’s history and provide good, high-paying jobs to hardworking Texans. With our highly skilled workforce, low taxes, and world-class, business-friendly climate, Texas is the best place for companies like Lilly to grow,” Abbott said in a statement.
TRUMP ORDERS TIGHTER RULES ON PRESCRIPTION DRUG ADVERTISING AS PART OF MAHA PUSH
The company said its planned 2025 investment announcements are more than double its investments since 2020. In the announcement, Ricks directly tied the investments to Trump’s agenda.
“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act legislation passed in 2017 during President Trump’s first term in office has been foundational to Lilly’s domestic manufacturing investments, and it is essential that these policies are extended this year,” Ricks said.