Rivian restarting work on its Georgia factory, emails show

Rivian will resume prep work on its planned Georgia factory in August and is still looking to break ground early next year, according to emails TechCrunch obtained through a public records request.  

The restarted effort comes months after the Biden administration’s Department of Energy approved a $6.6 billion loan meant to fund construction.

Rivian has invested more than $80 million in the project as of June 20, 2025, up from $41 million in July 2024, according to a progress report submitted to the local joint development authority included in the emails. The project has created 46 full-time jobs so far. Rivian will begin installing “deep utilities” in August, with “vertical construction” set to begin in the first quarter of 2026, according to the emails. 

The company is also reaching out to existing suppliers to see which ones might want to co-locate near the Georgia factory, the emails show. Rivian also asked the state’s economic development department for a list of suppliers already in the region that may be able to help build the R2 SUV and R3 hatchback at the factory when it opens in 2028.

Amid this push to restart the project, Rivian’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe met with the state’s governor Brian Kemp at the end of May. The company’s corporate affairs director told the governor’s office in an email that the meeting was a “top priority” for the company.

Peebles Squire, a spokesperson for Rivian, said the meeting between Scaringe and the governor was a “regular check-in.” 

“We discussed our ongoing work in Georgia and gave general project updates as well as discussed ways in which we can continue to have a strong partnership with the state,” he wrote in an email to TechCrunch. The governor’s press secretary did not respond to requests for comment.

Rivian first announced the Georgia factory shortly after its IPO in late 2021. The company originally planned to start construction in 2022 and have vehicle production up and running by 2024. It promised to invest $5 billion in the facility, and in May 2022, Rivian lined up $1.5 billion in state incentives to help make that happen.

The factory quickly faced local opposition. And the project took a back seat as Rivian worked around supply chain shortages during the ramp-up of its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV at its original factory in Normal, Illinois.

Rivian ultimately pushed back the timeline for the Georgia project in favor of expanding the Normal factory, for which it nabbed $827 million in incentives from Illinois. The company announced this delay in 2024 when it showed off the R2 SUV and R3 hatchback for the first time.

In late 2024, Rivian announced it had secured the $6.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. Specifically the loan would be coming from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, which is the same effort that helped Tesla navigate the Great Recession more than a decade ago. 

That loan agreement was finalized just a few days before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, and by that point the deal had already become a target of some of the people in the new president’s orbit. Vivek Ramaswamy, who at one point was supposed to co-lead Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, said he wanted to look into clawing back the loan.

After Trump took office, his administration froze all kinds of spending. Some of those freezes were reversed by lower district courts, while others have remained in place as the Supreme Court has mostly allowed the president to operate more freely.

In February, as the administration was shotgun-blasting these spending freezes across the government, Governor Kemp told a local news station he wasn’t sure of the status of the loan. 

(Squire, in the email, said Rivian continues to work “with DOE and the administration to bring thousands of quality, good paying jobs back to the United States. Electric vehicles are a global strategic industry, and the U.S. should maintain its leadership role in new technologies.”)

Just a few weeks later into March, the emails show, Rivian began coordinating with the governor’s staff for a face-to-face between Kemp and Scaringe. Originally slated to take place on April 9, the meeting had to be rescheduled because the Rivian CEO had a “personal conflict come up.” 

Andrew Capezzuto, the corporate affairs director for Rivian, said the meeting was “a top priority” in an apologetic email about the rescheduling.

As Capezzuto hashed out a new time for Scaringe and Kemp to meet, he was also in regular contact with Georgia’s economic development department (GCED), the emails show. 

“[W]e are interested in picking back up on supplier conversations,” he told that team on April 8. 

“I believe a while back GDEcD had prepared an overview of existing suppliers within Georgia and the greater South East region. Would it be possible to dust that list off so that we can see what suppliers and parts are already available? We would like to use that list to evaluate the existing supplier base and determine whether we can leverage any existing suppliers. That will then also help us determine which suppliers we’d like to consider locate [sic] in Georgia to support the SSN facility.”

In an email to TechCrunch, Squire said that “Georgia and the Southeast have a very strong automotive supplier base. We want to leverage that base to optimize logistics costs and reinforce a strong supply chain. It’s good for jobs, regionally and nationally, and promotes American manufacturing and economic development.”

As Rivian ramps up that supplier activity, the company is also starting to hire workers to support the buildout of the factory. It has posted seven open roles to LinkedIn within the last month, including one for construction manager.