An electric car manufacturing deal that was touted as the most recent possible use for the Foxconn plant in Racine County now appears headed to Ohio.
News outlets reported Thursday that Foxconn said it was planning to buy an auto assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, to build electric vehicles for Fisker, under an agreement that the two companies had announced in February.
In Foxconn’s announcement the company stated that the Ohio factory — a former General Motors plant now owned by Lordstown Motors Corp. — offered infrastructure, employees and a supply chain that would allow it to begin production for Fisker by the end of 2023, BizTimes Milwaukee reported.
A statement from the Taiwan-based manufacturer left open the possibility that the 1.4 million-square-foot plant the company built in Mount Pleasant could still be “a potential location for additional investment for Foxconn’s electric vehicle growth in the United States and continue to be the location for data infrastructure hardware and information and communication technology production.”
The Mount Pleasant plant was originally planned to be 20 million square feet and to produce advanced flat screens. The company first announced its plans for a Wisconsin facility in 2017, in return for $3 billion in state tax credits and another $1 billion worth of local government aid. That proposal shifted, and since then there have been repeated changes in Foxconn’s stated intentions for the Mount Pleasant site as well as for other operations and partnerships in the state.
With the company’s decision to discard the original plan that the state’s tax credits had been linked to, in April, Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. announced a revised agreement with Foxconn, reducing the state’s obligation to $80 million in tax credits through 2025.
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