Next NGA West Campus

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency turned on the lights at its new St. Louis campus on January 26, 2026, closing out the largest federal construction project the city has ever seen. Next NGA West, or N2W internally, is the long-promised replacement for NGA’s aging facilities in Soulard. Construction took a little over six years from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting, and the $1.7 billion price tag covers a 97-acre campus on the north side of downtown.

Project Scope

The campus centers on a 712,000-square-foot main office building, eight stories tall, that houses NGA’s geospatial analyst workforce and secure operations. Surrounding the main building are two multi-level parking garages, a secure visitor center, a delivery inspection facility, and the controlled-access perimeter and entry control points that a Top Secret-class federal facility requires. The 97-acre site was assembled by the City of St. Louis from a mix of residential, commercial and industrial parcels in the Carr Square and Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhoods, with several hundred properties acquired and cleared between 2017 and 2019.

McCarthy and HITT Contracting executed the work as a 50/50 design-build joint venture, with Gensler leading the architecture and Black & Veatch serving as engineer of record. Akima LLC handled the security integration scope. Major construction kicked off in November 2019 with substructure and security perimeter work. The first staff relocations from the Soulard facility started in February 2026 and will continue through the end of the year as the agency’s 3,150 employees migrate to the new building.

Why It Matters

For NGA, the new campus consolidates an operations footprint that had been spread across multiple buildings of varying ages and security postures. The agency’s mission, which centers on satellite imagery analysis and geospatial intelligence for the Department of Defense and intelligence community, has grown steadily with the post-2017 push toward overhead-platform investment. The new building is sized for that growth.

For St. Louis, N2W is the largest single federal investment in the city’s history. The campus anchors a section of the urban core that had been losing density for decades and represents the federal government’s longest-term commitment to a neighborhood that lost roughly 40% of its housing stock between 1970 and 2010. The City has set aside $20 million for adjacent neighborhood reinvestment, with additional support from Choice Neighborhoods funding and the Urban Land Institute’s technical assistance.

Project Team & Details