CLAYTON, N.C. — Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical giant, has broken ground on a 1.4 million-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Raleigh suburb of Clayton. The drugmaker plans to invest $4.1 billion in the development in order to boost the production of diabetes treatment Ozempic, weight loss drug Wegovy and other injectable therapies. Operations at the 56-acre site will include filling and packaging syringes and injection pens.
According to CNBC, the demand for Wegovy and Ozempic has outstripped supply in the United States over the past year. The disparity has led to “intermittent shortages,” reports the national news outlet.
In 2024 alone, Novo Nordisk is investing $6.8 billion into pharmaceutical production, up from approximately $4 billion last year.
“It took us a century to reach 40 million patients, but through this expansion and continued investment in our global production, we’re building Novo Nordisk’s ability to serve millions more people living with serious chronic diseases in the future,” says Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk. “This is yet another real signal of our efforts to scale up our production to meet the growing global need for our life-changing medicines and the patients of tomorrow.”
The expansion project will double the combined square footage of all three of Novo Nordisk’s current facilities in North Carolina, including its two existing facilities in Clayton. The company delivered its first Clayton facility in 1993 and its second across the street in 2016. Butch Lawter, chair of the Johnston County Board of Commissioners, says the latter property set the North Carolina record for largest life sciences investment at the time, and the new project breaks the state record again.
The Raleigh-Durham area has become an East Coast hub for life sciences projects. Known as the Research Triangle due to the largest research park in the country, Research Triangle Park, the region houses global pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Eli Lilly.
The Clayton project is slated to create 1,000 jobs in addition to the nearly 2,500 Novo Nordisk employees currently employed in the region. The company also estimates that 2,000 contractors will be employed at the height of the facility’s construction, which is scheduled for delivery in phases between 2027 and 2029. Early clearing and foundational projects are currently underway.
Novo Nordisk aims for the Clayton facility to achieve LEED Gold certification by using sustainable materials and resources, including rooftop solar panels.
In addition to its U.S. base in North Carolina, Novo Nordisk has four strategic operations in Denmark, France, Brazil and China. Founded in 1923, the company produces roughly half of the global supply of insulin, as well as glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) medicines to treat diabetes and obesity and medicines to treat rarer diseases including hemophilia and growth disorders. Novo Nordisk currently has 20,000 employees globally in its manufacturing unit and 66,000 company-wide in 80 countries.
— John Nelson