Genentech on Jan. 20 doubled its planned investment in a biomanufacturing campus in Holly Springs, North Carolina, expanding a project first announced in May 2025 that began last summer.
The move brings the facility to about $2 billion and materially increases the scope of construction already underway, providing a real-time test of whether biomanufacturing projects can continue to scale smoothly amid tightening infrastructure and delivery constraints.
“This expansion reflects our long-term commitment to America and communities like Holly Springs,” Genentech CEO Ashley Magargee said in a statement. “This additional investment will create more quality jobs, strengthen local partnerships and ensure a resilient supply of medicines for years to come.”
The expansion is not a new project announcement; reflects a capital increase for work already in progress. Genentech has not yet disclosed the revised square footage, building count or construction phases tied to the increase, but the added capital places the campus among the largest active biomanufacturing builds underway in the U.S., reshaping delivery considerations already underway.
An analysis published Jan. 26 by Newmark Research found that pharmaceutical and biomanufacturing projects posted the strongest investment growth among major advanced manufacturing sectors to 2025, driven by long-term demand, supply chain resilience goals and regulatory barriers that discourage rapid relocation once facilities are operational.
For builders, this durability comes with complexity. Biomanufacturing facilities are among the most infrastructure-intensive industrial projects being delivered today, requiring validated cleanrooms, redundant power systems, precision HVAC, and sophisticated water and wastewater treatment. Scaling up after an innovation generally reshapes execution risk more than core economics.
Power: Redundancy becomes the binding constraint
In advanced manufacturing projects, power quality and redundancy are increasingly more important than raw capacity, as the data center boom has shown. Semiconductor plants in Arizona and Texas have required dedicated substations and multi-year coordination with utilities, and transformer procurement becomes critical to planning.
Although biomanufacturing loads are generally lower, facilities of this scale often require dual-feed service, backup generation, and uninterruptible power for process-critical systems.
To accommodate future phases, owners typically oversize core service plants early in delivery, protecting long-term capacity but extending initial design timelines and increasing initial capital exposure. It was not disclosed whether Genentech’s expansion requires off-site utility upgrades or relies primarily on on-site redundancy.
Water and wastewater: a quieter pressure point
In biomanufacturing, wastewater treatment often presents a greater execution risk than water supply. Pharmaceutical production can generate complex effluent flows that exceed municipal discharge limits without pretreatment, pushing utility coordination and enabling the critical path even when building approvals are already in hand.
Comparable life sciences projects in North Carolina and other established centers have required on-site pretreatment systems and prolonged engagement with local utilities, in some cases extending schedules as discharge characteristics and capacity thresholds are negotiated. These challenges tend to intensify as projects scale, because wastewater systems are typically designed for maximum future capacity rather than initial operations, leading to early decisions affecting site design, underground work, and mechanical sequencing.
This dynamic is not exclusive to pharmaceutical products. A January analysis by Global Water Intelligence and Xylem examining how infrastructure-intensive industries intersect with municipal water systems found that the binding constraint is increasingly system adaptability rather than total supply.
“The biggest opportunity to increase water supply without increasing freshwater withdrawals is wastewater reuse,” the report states, adding that major industrial operators are increasingly willing to invest in reuse projects with municipal services to secure supply and improve overall system resilience.
It’s not yet clear whether Genentech’s expanded scope will require modified discharge permits or additional pretreatment capacity, but projects of similar scale have shown how wastewater considerations can become schedule-defining issues as construction progresses.
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Labor risk, permits and sequencing
A Newmark Research analysis shows that U.S. manufacturing investment has shifted by sector since 2019, with biomanufacturing accelerating in recent years while investment in electric vehicles has cooled. The data underscores why life science projects continue to expand even as other advanced manufacturing sectors recalibrate.
Infographic courtesy of Newmark Industrial Research
While domestic manufacturing employment contracted in 2025, markets hosting large manufacturing builds continued to add construction and supplier jobs. Newmark’s analysis shows that ecosystem job growth outpaces direct plant staffing in markets with major projects, reflecting sustained demand for skilled trades linked to facility construction.
To manage labor constraints, contractors on recent megaprojects have staggered the installation of cleanrooms, broken work into smaller packages, and extended commissioning phases to smooth labor demand. These strategies protect quality, but can stretch schedules, a key consideration when scope is extended mid-delivery.
Expansions that materially increase yield often result in permit amendments, even when zoning and land use remain unchanged. Owners are increasingly pursuing parallel early works packages (site work, utilities and foundations) as the detailed design process continues. This approach preserves momentum but adds complexity to coordination.
Genentech has not yet indicated whether the Holly Springs expansion will take place in a single integrated build or in multiple phases, a decision that will shape contractor hiring, risk allocation and flexibility as process requirements evolve.
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A starting point for resilient relocation
The Holly Springs expansion highlights how biomanufacturing is diverging from other relocation sectors. While some manufacturing projects announced earlier in the decade have been delayed or scaled back due to funding and market pressures, life science facilities continue to move forward and, in this case, expand after construction begins.
For readers, the main question is not whether Genentech will build, but how effectively projects in this class can absorb growth in scope as energy, water, labor and permitting constraints become tighter.
As construction details emerge, the project will serve as an indicator of whether the biomanufacturing push translates into predictable, buildable work, or simply changes in where execution risk is concentrated.
