Swiss industrial technology and power products provider ABB is investing $2 million and creating 15 jobs in Atlanta as part of a more than $170 million U.S. expansion bolstered by recent legislation aimed at boosting domestic manufacturing of renewable energy, electric vehicles, batteries and sensitive items like semiconductors.
The Atlanta investment will focus on a “packaging and logistics facility for end-to-end robotic automation solutions in warehouse and distribution, retail and logistics industries.” It is expected to happen this year.
ABB in 2018 bought Atlanta-based GE Industrial Solutions for $2.6 billion.
The bulk of ABB’s new investment in the U.S., coming on the heels of the hundreds of billions in subsidies for electric vehicles and related infrastructure baked into the Inflation Reduction Act and the more than $50 billion set aside for semiconductors in the CHIPS act, will be spent in a new $100 million facility for electrical drives in New Berlin, Wisconsin.
Besides Atlanta, the only other products set to be made in the South are electric vehicle chargers at a previously announced facility in Columbia, S.C. The investment from ABB’s e-mobility unit will create 100 jobs to Georgia’s east.
Based in Zurich, ABB says that about 85 percent of what it sees in the United States is produced domestically rather than in Europe or elsewhere.
Swiss companies, foreseeing more stringent regulation, have been preparing for some time to up their spending in the U.S., especially as many of their infrastructure-related products must see the majority of their value produced domestically to qualify under “Buy American” procurement rules.
ABB has a facility in Alpharetta but didn’t say where it would make job-creating investment in the metro area. ABB has more than 40 manufacturing facilities and 20,000 employees in the U.S.
Learn more about ABB’s plans here.
