Foxconn agrees $375 million Lordstown plant sale to pivot towards data centres

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By Wen-Yee Lee

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Taiwan’s Foxconn said on Monday it had struck a deal to sell a former car factory at Lordstown, Ohio, for $375 million, including its machinery, but said it would continue to use the site to make a broader range of products aligned with its strategic priorities.

Foxconn, which makes data center products for Nvidia and assembles iPhones for Apple, did not elaborate on products to be manufactured at the plant, but said the cloud and networking product business in particularly showed “significant growth”.

A source with direct knowledge of the matter said the Ohio site would support artificial intelligence data centers and that at more than 6 million square feet (557,000 sqm), it was six times larger than a plant Foxconn is building in Houston to manufacture Nvidia’s GB300 AI servers. The source did not give more details.

Foxconn purchased the plant, a former General Motors small-car factory named after the town in Ohio where it is located, in 2022 from now-bankrupt U.S. electric vehicle startup Lordstown Motors Corp for $230 million, as part of its efforts to expand into EVs.

Foxconn also invested in Lordstown and the companies started making electric pickup trucks there. But the partnership later soured, with Lordstown going out of business and suing Foxconn.

Foxconn said on Monday it sold the factory to an “existing business partner”, without giving details. 

It also said the company remained committed to automotive customers in the U.S. and said it would be able to rapidly ramp up automotive production to meet customer demand when required.

Foxconn has expanded beyond its traditional role as an iPhone assembler. Last week it formed a strategic partnership with industrial motor maker TECO Electric & Machinery to build data centres.

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee and Faith Hung in Taipei; Writing by Brenda Goh; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and David Holmes)