From White House pledge to Louisiana, Hyundai's $5.8b bet takes shape

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DONALDSONVILLE, Louisiana — Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun stood beside US President Donald Trump at the White House 17 months ago to unveil one of the Korean…

DONALDSONVILLE, Louisiana — Hyundai Motor Group Executive Chair Chung Euisun stood beside US President Donald Trump at the White House 17 months ago to unveil one of the Korean auto giant’s biggest bets on American manufacturing.

At the heart of the $21 billion US investment package unveiled in March 2025 — later increased to $26 billion — was a $5.8 billion steel mill in Louisiana, the group's first steel production base in the US and a move to make one of the most essential materials for vehicles directly on US soil.

On Friday, that pledge looked very different from the polished Roosevelt Room in Washington. Rain had swept across southern Louisiana earlier in the day, but by afternoon clouds had cleared and the sun beat down on sugarcane fields stretching along the roads into Donaldsonville, a small city in in Ascension Parish with a long history of sugarcane farming.

Much of the 7.37 square-kilometer site, once sugarcane farmland, had been graded for the major work ahead. A handful of excavators, bulldozers and dump trucks dotted the vast property alongside temporary buildings serving as site offices.

There is no steel mill here yet. Full-scale construction is set to begin in the fourth quarter once permitting procedures are cleared.

But by 2029, Hyundai Steel, the steel making unit of Hyundai Motor Group, expects the empty land to be transformed into an integrated steelmaking complex capable of producing 2.7 million tons of steel annually to be used for vehicle bodies.

It was here Friday that Hyundai Steel and Posco, South Korea’s two largest steelmakers and longtime competitors at home, formally marked the launch of Hyundai-Posco Louisiana Steel, or HPLS, their first joint electric arc furnace steelmaking venture in the US.

More than 250 senior government officials from the US and South Korea, as well as business leaders, gathered to celebrate the project’s first tangible milestone since its announcement last March.

“This plant will be both our company’s first…

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