Rivian has officially broken ground on its long-planned factory near Atlanta, Georgia, which will one day allow the company to make as many as 400,000 of its next-generation electric vehicles per year.
The company held a shovel ceremony on Tuesday where CEO RJ Scaringe was joined by Georgia officials, including Governor Brian Kemp. But, as TechCrunch first reported in July, the company is still eyeing the first quarter of 2026 for an official construction start-date, with vehicle production starting in 2028. Most of what’s taking place now is prep work, like hooking up electrical systems and water supply, and building out access roads.
Rivian projects the factory will eventually create 7,500 permanent jobs, with 2,000 construction jobs created during the building process. As of June 30, the company had created 47 full-time jobs and invested around $80 million in the project, according to emails obtained by TechCrunch earlier this year.
In addition to the jobs at the factory, Rivian said Tuesday that it expects to create “an additional nearly 8,000 indirect jobs” with local suppliers and vendors, according to an outside analysis. The emails TechCrunch obtained earlier this year showed that Rivian was already asking existing suppliers whether they would set up operations near the Georgia factory.
While the event was a bit of pageantry, it represents an important milestone for the project, which has been surrounded by a lot of uncertainty over the last few years.
Rivian first announced plans to build a factory in Georgia shortly after its IPO in 2021. At that point, the company had spent years refurbishing an old Mitsubishi plant in Normal, Illinois in order to start production of its R1T truck, R1S SUV, and commercial vans. But the Illinois factory’s size constrained how many vehicles could be made there. Rivian wanted something bigger.
Rivian promised to invest around $5 billion in the Georgia factory, and it wanted to move quick: the company was initially looking to start construction in 2022.
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However, local opposition to the factory, along with supply chain challenges caused by the pandemic, forced Rivian to turn its attention away from Georgia for a while. In March 2024, the company announced it had officially delayed the Georgia project in favor of expanding its Illinois factory so that it could start production of its next-generation vehicle, the more-affordable R2 SUV, on time.
Rivian prioritized the Georgia factory plans again in late 2024 when it announced it was close to securing a $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to help fund construction. That deal was completed in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency, though the funds won’t be distributed to Rivian until it achieves certain milestones.
In the weeks leading up to Donald Trump’s second term, some of the soon-to-be president’s allies took aim at Rivian’s factory as a project that could be targeted by the incoming administration. Vivek Ramaswamy, who at one point was supposed to co-lead Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, went as far as saying the administration might try to claw back the loan.
But Rivian’s loan has remained intact, and the company has worked closely with the Georgia Governor’s office in recent months as it once again spun up operations. The company has big plans for the new factory, with Scaringe telling CNBC Tuesday that he hopes it will build vehicles for a global market come 2028.
