Bayer’s $2.2 billion pharmaceutical manufacturing campus in New Albany, Ohio, has an early-design engineer and nothing else. Fluor Corp. worked with the drugmaker on site selection and is staying on for early design, a Bayer spokesperson told Engineering News-Record on Oct. 5. The detailed design firm, the construction manager and the general contractor are all unassigned.
Bayer told ENR it expects to settle its procurement approach and timing in early 2027. Construction is targeted for mid-2027.
What the $2.2 billion Bayer campus includes
The company announced the project on Oct. 2 as a modular campus in the New Albany International Business Park that will make both drug substance and finished drug product for oncology, cardiovascular and renal medicines. It comes in two pieces:
- A drug-substance manufacturing module, operational in 2031.
- A drug-product module, planned for 2034.
Bayer puts construction employment at roughly 1,500 and permanent jobs at about 600. It hasn’t published a square footage. The land figure depends on who’s counting: ENR, citing New Albany officials, reported an initial site of about 110 acres with an option on 85 more, while Fierce Pharma put the purchase at approximately 200 acres. Those can both be true if the option is exercised. Nobody has said it has been.
Incentives are still open too. ENR reported that an Ohio Job Creation Tax Credit will go before the state’s Tax Credit Authority at a later meeting and that JobsOhio’s package won’t be public until agreements are signed.
A New Albany pharma plant enters a crowded labor market
Seven years from groundbreaking to the second module is a long build, and it’s going to be staffed out of a craft market that’s already stretched. The same business park and its surroundings hold Intel’s $28 billion semiconductor project, where Bechtel leads construction, a $2 billion Vantage Data Centers campus with Turner Construction as general contractor, a Google data center campus and an Amgen site that ENR says is now building out in under seven years instead of the 20 first planned.
That’s the part worth pricing. A cGMP plant needs process pipefitters, orbital welders, cleanroom installers and commissioning staff. So do chip fabs. So, increasingly, do liquid-cooled data halls. Bayer’s 1,500 construction jobs don’t arrive in an empty market. They compete with owners who are already paying to hold crews. Central Ohio has been here before, and the Great Lakes megaproject surge hasn’t let up.
The state appears to know it. A nearly $38 million Ohio Life Science Training Center is scheduled to open in summer 2027, with $30 million from JobsOhio, according to ENR. It trains biomanufacturing operators and technicians. It doesn’t train welders.
Fluor’s early design role and the open procurement
For contractors, the news is the vacancy. Early design with Fluor doesn’t commit Bayer to an EPC model, and the spokesperson’s wording, that the company is still evaluating procurement, detailed engineering and construction, leaves room for anything from a single EPCM award to a construction manager with separate process packages. Fluor has spent the fall booking LNG work on mostly lump-sum terms; pharma owners rarely buy that way.
Bayer says the campus builds on more than $7 billion of U.S. pharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing spending over five years. The firms that want this one have about three months before the owner says how it intends to buy.