Nucor Vulcraft DeKalb County: $59M, 127,000 Sq Ft, and a Competitive Strike Against IKG and AMICO

Nucor announced August 13th that it's investing $59 million to build a 127,000-square-foot facility on its existing 250-acre campus in St. Joe, DeKalb County: adding steel grating production to a site that already makes joists, girders, and deck. Twenty new jobs at a $95,000 average annual salary. Groundbreaking is Q4 2026.

The competitive angle worth your procurement team's attention: the integrated campus (joists, deck, and grating from a single location) is a direct strike against IKG and AMICO, which have to coordinate with separate suppliers on design-build projects. The automation package Vulcraft is installing (automated panel welding and plasma cutting) signals they intend to compete on lead time from day one. But the real differentiator is not speed alone. It is that joists, deck, and grating ship from one campus. That is the value proposition IKG and AMICO cannot match at this location. And the timing is not accidental: Amazon's announced $15 billion data center buildout in New Carlisle sits squarely in Vulcraft St. Joe's service radius.

One buried vulnerability worth flagging. Based on a review of publicly available UL and NSF EPD registries, a product-specific bar grating Environmental Product Declaration from Vulcraft could not be located, while IKG and AMICO have published Type III declarations. That gap matters on the growing subset of federal and LEED v5 projects where product-specific EPDs are scored or required. The $59 million closes the fabrication gap. It does nothing to close the EPD gap. If your structural steel specs currently lock you into IKG or AMICO grating relationships, find out now whether Vulcraft is a credible alternate when that new line comes online.