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North Carolina has pulled the plug on a state tax incentive worth up to $3 million for Ball Corporation after the aluminum can manufacturer failed to hire the 220 workers it promised at its planned Concord facility. The company had pledged in 2021 to invest $383.3 million and create those jobs at The Grounds at Concord, the sprawling 2,100-acre former Philip Morris cigarette manufacturing site located about 17 miles northeast of uptown Charlotte, but it never came close to meeting the hiring bar within the grant's timeframe.
The N.C. Economic Investment Committee voted to terminate Ball Metal Beverage Container Corp.'s Job Development Investment Grant, according to The Charlotte Observer, which first reported the cancellation. Ball had requested the termination itself after acknowledging it could not meet the employment targets within the agreed window. The company has not received any payments under the grant, since North Carolina's JDIG program only reimburses companies after they verify actual new hiring through payroll tax withholdings — meaning no taxpayer dollars were ever at risk, according to the NC Department of Commerce.
Ball, an aluminum beverage packaging company based in Colorado, was slated to join Red Bull and Rauch at The Grounds in Concord, where the three companies had intended to invest more than $1 billion and create over 600 jobs in Cabarrus County by 2027. Ball's share of that plan called for manufacturing aluminum cans for Red Bull and other clients at a new 800,000-square-foot facility, with jobs paying an expected average annual salary of $70,555 — well above Cabarrus County's average wage of $41,255. Kathleen Pitre said project delays impacted Ball Corp.'s ability to meet its investment and job-creation deadlines, per the Observer's reporting.
A Broader Pattern of Incentive Failures
Ball's situation is far from unique. JDIGs serve as North Carolina's primary incentive tool for attracting corporate expansions, but many recipient companies have seen their grants terminated after failing to achieve original hiring or investment milestones since the program's inception in the early 2000s. A Carolina Journal report published in February found that nearly half of all JDIG agreements statewide between fiscal years 2003 and 2025 — 49.4 percent — failed to hit their job creation targets, resulting in widespread cancellations across the state's flagship incentive program.
Ball's own financial troubles help explain the shortfall. The company reported a 9.9 percent volume decline in its North and Central American beverage can business in the third quarter of 2023, driven by disruptions in the U.S. mass beer market, as detailed by Brewbound. That downturn led Ball to defer construction on the Concord plant to balance regional supply with demand. The company has also been restructuring more broadly, selling its aerospace business in 2024 to cut debt and refocus solely on metal packaging.
What Happens to the Rest of the Megasite
Ball Corp.'s operations status in Concord remains unclear, and whether it will still build its can plant using private capital on a delayed timeline — or scale back involvement altogether — is an open question. What is certain is that the broader beverage campus is moving forward without the state incentive attached to Ball's piece of it. Red Bull, Rauch, and Ball officially broke ground on the joint $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion beverage complex last September, though full production capacity of 3 billion cans annually has been pushed back to 2031, according to Mass Market Retailers. Red Bull expects its own operations at The Grounds to begin by 2028.
The Concord hub is modeled after Red Bull, Ball, and Rauch's first integrated U.S. campus in Glendale, Arizona, which opened in 2021, per Supply Chain Dive, which reported that overhead conveyor bridges are designed to link Ball's can factory directly to Rauch's filling lines in a single contiguous complex. Local governments in Cabarrus County and the City of Concord had separately approved their own incentive packages back in 2022, offering Red Bull more than $24 million and Rauch $37.2 million in municipal grants as both companies expanded their investment commitments, according to WSOC-TV — those local awards are structured independently of the state's JDIG program and are unaffected by Ball's grant termination.
A Site With a Long Industrial History
The Grounds at Concord sits on land that once housed a massive Philip Morris USA cigarette manufacturing plant, which opened in 1982 and closed in 2009, eliminating thousands of local tobacco manufacturing jobs. The site sat mostly vacant for a decade before demolition began in 2019 and the property was rebranded as an industrial megasite, according to NC Capital Group. Despite Ball's setback, the site has continued to draw major tenants — Eli Lilly and Company announced a $1 billion investment in 2022 to build an 800,000-square-foot drug manufacturing facility there, bringing nearly 600 high-wage life-sciences jobs to Cabarrus County, as Hoodline previously reported.
Ball had been absent from manufacturing in the Carolinas since idling its Reidsville, North Carolina, facility around 2018, even as competitors Ardagh Metal Packaging and Crown Holdings built major production plants across the two states, according to Fastmarkets. A 50 percent federal tariff on imported aluminum enacted in 2025 has since pushed beverage companies to expand domestic packaging infrastructure to reduce exposure to overseas imports, per inside.beer — a shift that underscores why the Concord campus still matters even with Ball's piece of it in limbo.
