Roche to spend $50B on US R&D, manufacturing sites over the next five years

Roche has announced plans to invest $50 billion in its pharmaceutical and diagnostics operations in the United States over the next five years.

The investment will support the development of new research and manufacturing facilities across several states and is expected to generate more than 12,000 new jobs, including 1,000 positions at Roche and roughly 11,000 in support of expanded manufacturing capacity.

The funding will go toward several key projects, including a new gene therapy manufacturing site in Pennsylvania, a continuous glucose monitoring facility in Indiana, and a 900,000-square-foot manufacturing center for weight loss medicines, with the location to be announced.

Roche will also expand its existing sites in Arizona, California, Indiana, and other states, while opening a new R&D center in Massachusetts focused on AI-driven research in cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic diseases.

With more than 25,000 employees already in the U.S., Roche operates 15 R&D centers and 13 manufacturing sites across its pharmaceutical and diagnostics divisions. The new investments will further expand the company’s footprint in states including California, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Oregon.

Once the new infrastructure is operational, Roche expects to export more medicines from the U.S. than it imports. The company’s diagnostics division already runs a trade surplus. The investment marks a continuation of Roche’s 110-year presence in the U.S., underscoring its emphasis on domestic innovation and production, according to CEO Thomas Schinecker.

While Roche is a Swiss company with a “strong heritage” in more than 130 countries, Schinecker said in a statement that its $50 billion investment demonstrates a “long-standing commitment to research, development and manufacturing in the U.S.”

Roche’s investment in U.S. manufacturing comes on the heels of recent announcements by Eli Lilly, J&J, and Novartis that they are making multi-year capital expenditures on domestic production. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to impose “major” tariffs on pharmaceuticals “very shortly” while predicting that drug manufacturers “will come rushing back into our country.”