North Carolina slams brakes on EV megafactory deal after years of delay 

It sounded too good to be true, and it was.

In 2022, Vietnamese carmarker Vinfast, billing itself as a major global player in electric vehicles, announced it would build a megafactory to produce EVs and batteries on a sprawling site in Chatham County, bringing $4 billion in investment and 7,500 jobs to the largely rural area.

The state of North Carolina rushed to secure the deal, promising the “transformative project” a rich economic development package, including half a billion dollars in state job incentives as well as around $400 million in local incentives and property tax breaks, plus new roads, free land and training programs.

Four years later, the state is suing to claw back the land and around $80 million it already gave VinFast. State Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced Thursday his office has filed suit in Wake County Superior Court against the company on behalf of the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

Jackson said that the company breached its contracts with the state.

“VinFast agreed to build a factory and create jobs for North Carolinians — it didn’t do either,” Jackson said in a statement. “When North Carolina makes a deal, we build in protection for taxpayers. VinFast broke the deal, so we’re using that protection to find a project for this site that will create jobs.”

Vinfast officials did not immediately respond to NC Newsline’s request for comment. The lawsuit comes on the same day Reuters reported VinFast is planning to exit manufacturing and is selling its two main factories in Vietnam.

The North Carolina factory was supposed to be under construction by 2024 and operational by 2026. But the Moncure site, according to the filing, has been largely abandoned since the end of 2024. The company hasn’t had a construction contract since the end of that year, and the building and environmental permits VinFast had obtained expired and were not renewed.

Monday numbers: the environmental impacts of the VinFast electric car factory in Chatham County

VinFast has said publicly that it does not expect its facility will be operational until at least 2028. But in the lawsuit, Jackson said the state never agreed to extend the timeline for the contract. And he said there’s no evidence that any work is currently underway at the site, despite the company’s insistence that it is.

According to the complaint, VinFast executives were informed they were in default in January 2026 after a year of state inquiries and requests for verification of funding or work at the site.

The lawsuit says company executives claimed as recently as March 2026 that they were about to resume construction, but had proposed drastically scaling back the project, perhaps to just a distribution center instead of a car factory.

On Thursday, Gov. Josh Stein said VinFast Manufacturing simply did not honor its commitments or meet previously agreed upon benchmarks.

“Today’s action is about protecting taxpayers and getting the Chatham County mega-site back on the market to support future good-paying manufacturing jobs,” Stein said.

Click here to read the complaint.