Along State Highway 16 on the south side of San Antonio, a 50-foot-tall steel structure rises from a network of 414 concrete piers driven 40 feet into expansive clay soils. The cranes travel around the interior of the building. A low hum runs through the place: the pumps are working.
British heavy equipment manufacturer JCB bought this 400-acre tract of farmland with plans for a 500,000-square-foot American factory. But before construction began, that number doubled. Today, the 1 million-square-foot structure is coming out of the ground, closing what will become the company’s most automated factory in its 80-year history, and the first to ensure that most of what it sells in North America is made there.
The decision to double the footprint was formalized in April 2025, when JCB announced the expansion in direct response to the Trump administration’s tariff announcements. Chief executive Graeme Macdonald said in the company’s statement that the tariffs would have a “significant impact” on its business in the short term, but that the San Antonio factory would help mitigate those effects in the medium term. Ben Emery, JCB’s senior director of engineering projects and the company’s point person on the ground since pre-construction, frames the scale as consistent with a longer vision. “We bought 400 acres and planned a 500,000-square-foot facility,” he says. “We’re doing a million square feet now, so we can do more, faster.” The land had been bought with a 50-year horizon in mind, he adds, the tariff announcement accelerating a trajectory that was already underway.
JCB’s San Antonio facility will produce Loadall telehandlers and aerial access equipment.
Photo courtesy of Joeris General Contractors
The logic of the market is simple. About 80% of what JCB sells in North America is currently imported. Once the San Antonio plant begins operating its first product lines—Loadall telehandlers and aerial access equipment—that relationship is expected to reverse. “85% of what we sell in North America is made in North America,” says Emery. “This frees up capacity in our UK plants to build more machines for the UK as well. So it’s a good growth strategy.”
Joeris General Contractors, the San Antonio-based construction manager at risk, was involved from the start. “We got into the napkin drawing stage,” says Rusty Medlin, vice president of industrial at Joeris. Pre-construction began in February 2024, and construction began in March 2025 once the full civil and foundation package was completed. The team received 100% of the construction documents that August. The project is deep in vertical construction, with a phased rotation beginning September 10 and final completion scheduled for late January 2027. To date, the project has logged approximately 438,000 hours of work on site.
The facility is part of the company’s plan to expand its manufacturing footprint in North America.
Photo courtesy of Joeris General Contractors
Forty feet down
Building at scale in the farmlands of southern San Antonio began with a problem beneath the surface. The site’s expansive clay soils—high-PVR material that swells when wet and shrinks during dry periods—required deep foundations before a single column could be erected. “Coordination becomes critical when you have different packages: a foundation package, a civil package, a construction package,” says Joeris Project Executive Reuben Torres, noting that the sequencing demands that come with such a large footprint present challenges even before the core construction team is fully mobilized.
For JCB, the conditions were a departure from anything the company had built before. “We had to excavate 6 feet, remove fat clays, compact the base and install 414 piers 40 feet deep,” says Emery. “This is not typical of England – we normally use our feet outstretched. It was new to us but the locals said it was normal. Local knowledge has been key.”
Crews advance work inside the JCB factory, using aerial equipment to install and connect structural steel.
Photo courtesy of Joeris General Contractors
The foundation’s challenges were just the beginning. Managing traffic patterns, deliveries and commercial sequencing on a 400-acre active site required a level of coordination uncommon in more contained urban projects. “The logistics seem simple, though [they are] not really,” says Randen Sheehan, one of Joeris’ five project superintendents. “We have a logistics plan that’s a living document. We adapt every day based on weather conditions, deliveries, staging around the building, how we build the structure and how we adapt to other business partners.”
“We bought 400 acres; we’re currently building on 105. The vision is to fill all 400.”
—Ben Emery, Senior Director, Engineering Projects, JCB
On the day ENR visited, the South Texas weather put that plan to the test. After months of drought, a severe storm in early May dropped 3 inches of rain on the site in less than 24 hours, forcing the crew to deploy seven pumps, work over the weekend to dewater areas slated for concrete and spread lime to speed drying. “We should be back on our slabs tomorrow,” said Tim Edward, superintendent, after the storm. The site’s temporary road network was built to handle the load—more than 250 semi-trucks of owner-furnished equipment move through the property—and it has held up. “If we didn’t have the road structure we have, we’d still have 12-foot wheels,” Medlin says. “But the road surfaces are still in good condition.”
Keeping enough workers on site is part of the logistical challenge itself, especially with other major projects underway in the area. “With SpaceX, Tesla, Samsung, NXP and the data centers, [workforce] can be a problem,” says Sheehan. To stay ahead of these limitations, Joeris leaned on a network of business partners built over nearly six decades in San Antonio. “Joeris has been around since 1967,” says Medlin. “We have more than 8,000 business partners in our database, and we’re only one contractor in Texas.” The company executed design assistance agreements with all MEP trades, an approach that allowed an early verification of each partner’s ability to manage resources and change orders.
Construction workers move under exposed steel beams while aerial machines support the interior construction.
Photo courtesy of Joeris General Contractors
Separated by design
The project team looked to the JCB facility in Savannah, Ga., as a reference for the San Antonio design. Members of the Joeris preconstruction team who toured the Savannah plant came back with one thing in common: Learning to manage heat was one of the most important lessons, Medlin says.
In response, the design team evaluated four HVAC approaches before settling on a water-cooled system sized to maintain a defined ambient temperature during a peak day in August with the full factory plant in operation.
“This facility will employ 1,400 people. You can already see the growth around the property: apartments, shopping centers.”
—Randen Sheehan, Superintendent, Joeris General Contractors
JCB took the lesson further by separating its process areas into separate buildings. The paint shop, the welding shop and the assembly room are no longer under the same roof. “Paint shops get hot, so they’re in their own zone,” says Emery. “The welding shops get smoky, so we have huge extraction systems. The assembly is clean, cooled and in its own building.”
The welding fume extraction system filters the air and returns it as a clean, cooled supply, rather than exhausting it completely, which would increase the heat load. For the paint shop, JCB adopted an electric fly bar conveyor from supplier Thermatonics that allows each part to move independently down the line. “If one of them has a problem, we can fix it in isolation and the rest of the plant can still continue,” says Emery.
Structural flexibility ran through all important design decisions. Column spacing was set at 40 meters to allow large equipment to reposition without restriction. Crane systems were installed throughout the facility for full overhead coverage. The insulated panel walls are designed for future removal as the assembly room expands outward. “We design facilities to be flexible and modular because what we do today may change 10 years from now,” says Emery.
After May showers moved through the region, an aerial view shows construction activity continuing across the site.
Photo courtesy of Joeris General Contractors
The vision of 400 acres
Emery joined the project as employee #4 on JCB’s Texas roster. The local team is already 50 years old and will reach several hundred by the end of the year. Instead of competing for existing talent, JCB built a pipeline. The company sources welders through San Antonio’s Palo Alto College, which operates a 30-bay welding program, and plans to supply training equipment to area schools. Second-chance employment and ex-servicemen recruitment programs round out the strategy. “We’ve been blown away by the talent available,” says Emery.
The wider construction extends well beyond the current building envelope. With a master plan projecting up to 3.5 million square feet across five or six buildings, the site has significant room for growth. “We bought 400 acres; we’re currently building on 105,” says Emery. “The vision is to fill the 400.”
The community impact is already visible beyond the fence. “This is a great opportunity for San Antonio,” Sheehan says. “This facility will employ 1,400 people. You can already see the growth around the property: apartments, shopping centers.”
What visitors won’t see from the road is what JCB is building inside. Next to the factory, the company is planning a permanent two-story exhibition covering its 80-year history, called “The JCB Story”. The exhibit is a deliberate statement about what kind of business is taking root here. It remains family-owned, founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford and chaired by Lord Anthony Bamford since 1975.
Last year, Lord Bamford visited the site during a week that was unusually heavy: JCB was celebrating its 80th anniversary, which coincided with his own 80th birthday. Before leaving, he planted the first tree on the property. A plaque marks the spot. When the plant is complete, the tree will stand in front of a building with a lake, landscape and a museum that tells the story of JCB. “It’s more than a factory, a concrete box on Main Street,” says Emery. “They will see the lake [and] how much we care about making it a beautiful and functional place, and we will tell the story of this family business.”
