Novartis plans Morrisville drug factory in $23 billion U.S. expansion

Morrisville is moving deeper into the pharmaceutical manufacturing map as Novartis adds a drug-making plant to its Wake County footprint, a sign that the competition for life-sciences jobs is shifting from lab space to the factory floor.

The Switzerland-based company said April 30 that it plans a 56,200-square-foot facility in Morrisville as part of a $23 billion U.S. investment program. Novartis said the site will make active pharmaceutical ingredients for solid-dose tablets and capsules, along with RNA therapeutics, placing Wake County inside the part of the supply chain that actually produces medicines rather than simply storing or shipping them.

The Morrisville project is the seventh new U.S. facility Novartis has announced within a year. The company said the North Carolina buildout would give it five facilities across three sites in the state and help it move toward end-to-end manufacturing in the United States for all advanced technology platforms, a first in company history.

That long-range strategy has local economic stakes. In November 2025, Novartis said its North Carolina expansion would create 700 new jobs in the state by the end of 2030. The Town of Morrisville later said the company expected to invest more than $231 million in Wake County and create more than 100 high-paying jobs in Morrisville, with more investment and hundreds more jobs expected by the end of the decade.

The North Carolina Biotechnology Center put the Triangle-wide expansion at $771 million across Wake and Durham counties, with as many as 700 jobs by 2031 and an average annual salary of $111,161 for the new positions. That kind of pay would put the jobs well above many countywide wage benchmarks and could increase demand for engineers, technicians, maintenance workers and specialized contractors who support regulated pharmaceutical production.

What remains unclear is how quickly Novartis will hire, when construction will begin and how much strain the project could place on local roads, utilities and workforce pipelines. Those are the questions that matter for Morrisville and the rest of Wake County as another major pharma footprint moves from announcement to ground-level reality.

The Morrisville plant also fits a broader Triangle strategy. Novartis said the North Carolina hub would strengthen end-to-end U.S. production from active ingredients through finished medicines, including time-sensitive radioligand therapies. The company has also operated in Durham for about two decades and employs about 350 people there in gene therapy work, giving the region a deeper Novartis base than a single new plant.

For Wake County, the bigger story is not just a new building. It is whether Morrisville can keep attracting advanced manufacturing at the same time the county is managing growth, transportation pressure and a tight labor market around one of the country’s most competitive life-sciences corridors.