Generac to add new manufacturing facility in Sussex, more than 100 jobs

Waukesha-based Generac is opening a new manufacturing plant in Sussex that will employ more than 100 factory workers, the company announced Monday.

In late December, Generac bought the facility from Quad/Graphics for $20 million, according to records from the state Department of Revenue.

Generac said the new facility will allow the company to expand manufacturing of commercial and industrial backup power systems used by data centers and other industries. 

The Sussex plant is expected to open in the fourth quarter of 2026.

In a statement, Generac President and CEO Aaron Jagdfeld said demand for data center capacity globally is expected to more than triple by the end of the decade, creating “unprecedented demand” for power. 

He also said the new facility in Sussex will grow the company’s manufacturing capacity to meet that demand.

“We are uniquely positioned to meet that challenge as a trusted brand focused on backup power solutions for more than 65 years,” Jagdfeld stated. “Our commitment to aggressively invest in serving this booming segment offers a generational opportunity for Generac.”

Along with a new plant in Beaver Dam that opened last summer, and expanded operations in Oshkosh, the company said the new plant in Sussex is part of a strategy aimed at boosting manufacturing capacity for its commercial and industrial products.

Generac said adding “large-megawatt generators” to the company’s product portfolio helped it enter the “rapidly growing” data center market.

During the company’s third quarter 2025 earnings call in October, the most recent earnings report, Jagdfeld said the large scale generators represent a “massive opportunity” for Generac as a “long-standing, well-known” company.

He said the company was already seeing “significant momentum in the data center market” and its order backlog of large-megawatt generators doubled in the third quarter to $300 million.

“The first domestic shipments of these new large-output generators began here in the month of October, and we are projecting strong sequential growth in sales to the data center end market during the fourth quarter,” he said. 

Jagdfeld said the data center boom had the potential of doubling Generac’s sales of commercial and industrial products in the next three to five years.

Jagdfeld also hinted at additional expansion plans in October, saying the company was “actively exploring” additional investments in late 2025 to “aggressively” increase manufacturing capacity.

“We expect to undertake several important capacity expansion-related projects and investments during the fourth quarter to position Generac as a significant producer of these products well beyond 2026,” he said.

Jagdfeld said the company needed to add facilities and space because the large-megawatt generators are “big units” that “take up a lot of room.” In October, he said the company was in negotiations on “a number of facilities” both “in Wisconsin and other parts of the U.S.”

Demand for large output generators also helped bolster the company during an “extremely low” power outage environment that lowered demand for home standby and portable generators, said York Ragen, Generac’s chief financial officer.

“Commercial and industrial product sales for the third quarter increased 9 percent to $358 million as compared to $328 million in the prior year,” Ragen said.

That’s as the company’s net sales decreased by 5 percent in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in the prior year, with residential product sales down approximately 13 percent.

Beyond data centers, Generac said the new Sussex facility will allow the company to better provide backup power systems for other industries like health care, hospitality and heavy industrial plants.