Two dates and one build
Elanco Animal Health broke ground on its global headquarters at the former General Motors Stamping Plant site on 12 April 2022. Employees moved into the finished campus on 1 October 2025.
The 2022 ceremony drew governor Eric Holcomb and secretary of commerce Brad Chambers to the near west side. Chief executive Jeff Simmons said the project would push the centre of downtown westward.
The plans filed in 2022
The 2022 plan put a $100 million global headquarters on 45 acres of the former GM Stamping Plant site. The headquarters building was set at 220,000 square feet, with a six-story structure and other buildings on the west side of the White River.
The plan kept part of the remaining ironworks and enclosed it in glass for community events. The state said the remainder of the 91-acre industrial site would be developed as walkable, mixed-use space.
The plant's last worker left the manufacturing shell in June 2011. The plant once employed 5,500 people. Ambrose Property Group completed its purchase of the site in 2018, and the remaining buildings came out in 2014 under RACER Trust, which handled the property before that sale.
What was delivered
The completed campus carries a $200-million-plus price tag and holds three buildings. A six-story administration building sits alongside two two-story buildings, one for laboratory space and one for the collaboration space Elanco calls its crossroads building.
Elanco reports a global workforce of about 9,450, with more than 700 people working out of the new headquarters. The headquarters moved from Greenfield along Interstate 70.
The opening ceremony ran on Wednesday, 1 October 2025. A dog named Indy, from the Indianapolis pet-training company Medical Mutts Service Dogs, chewed through a ceremonial ribbon loaded with beef biscuits. Students from the nearby IPS Edison School for the Arts provided a drum line and dancing. Simmons and governor Mike Braun spoke.
The employee programme includes workstations, some of them outdoors, a wellness centre and gym, courts for pickleball, bocce ball and basketball, a cafe and coffee shop, innovation laboratories and an enclosed dog park. The campus takes dogs.
The land sale and the district
The state sold an additional portion of the old Stamping Plant site to Elanco for $27 million. The sale sits inside the effort to expand the OneHealth Innovation District, a partnership between Elanco, Purdue University and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation.
Purdue president Mung Chiang said Indianapolis forms part of Purdue's main campus and named the district as the partnership's work on human, animal and plant health.
The crane bay comes down
The 2022 plan kept the plant's crane bay for a glassed-in event space. IBJ reported on 5 September 2025 that the crane bay structure sat under demolition and the event-pavilion plan had been scrapped.
The scope, stated plainly
The build ran from an April 2022 groundbreaking to an October 2025 occupancy. It delivered three buildings and more than 700 desks on a former industrial site west of the White River. The district around it remains a plan.
The record reviewed for this piece carries no function square footage, no room count, no seating capacity and no rate card for the campus. Those questions go to Elanco and to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation.