With its main headquarters in California, EV maker Rivian is planning to buy a second home on the East Coast. This as it prepares for construction of a new manufacturing facility just outside of Atlanta next year.
Actually, come to think of it, buying a second home on the East Coast part of the playbook for several wealthy Californians, though we’re not sure how many are splurging on a $6 factory in Georgia to accompany the purchase.
That’s the approximate price tag Rivian has appended to its new facility, helped into life by a $6.6 billion loan from the Energy Department. The assembly plant is intended to make copies of the R2 and upcoming R3, starting in 2028. Those in the know privately whisper in hushed unofficial tones that the latter (and the R3X) isn’t likely to appear in any sort of volume until 2030. Rivian currently makes vehicles in Normal, Illinois.
Speculation aside, the new factory in Georgia is scheduled to be built in two phases, eventually capable of a 400,000-unit annual production capacity spread out over a campus measuring some 16 million square feet. Roughly 7,500 jobs are promised. This explains why the company wishes to plant a few office roots in Atlanta, occupying the top floor and lobby of a building on the so-called Atlanta Beltline. With an injection of a promised 500 workers, Rivian would bring a slew of new human activity to what local media describes as a modernistic, mixed-use structure which opened in the 2023 calendar year and now counts snazzy restaurants amongst its tenants.
Rivian says it raked in a gross profit of $170 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, primarily driven by improvements in variable costs and revenue per delivered unit. For the entire calendar year of 2024, Rivian reported it produced 49,476 vehicles and delivered 51,579. Compare those numbers with what is expected to pop out of this new Georgia plant when it is operating at capacity. That’s a huge jump and we’ll be watching real-world sales closely.
[Images: Rivian]
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