Completed at the end of 2024, and virtually unoccupied since then, the vast Spark LS life sciences park in Morrisville, NC was jolted to life in December 2025 when a mysterious, unnamed tenant signed a lease for 1.3 million of its 1.5 million square feet. It was said to be the largest manufacturing lease signed in the U.S. last year and gave a significant boost to the region’s advanced manufacturing resources.
Developed by affiliates of Miami-based Starwood Capital and Charlotte-based Trinity Capital, the 110- acre park is located in the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, home to many pharmaceutical and life sciences companies.
And the ink was barely dry on the new tenant’s lease when it was announced that a major investor had acquired the park for $226.5 million.
In an interview with GlobeSt.com, Jeff Sheehan, managing partner at Trinity Capital, declined to name either the tenant or the investor. But the tenant has been widely identified in the press as Millennium Print Group, the printer of Pokémon cards and the purchaser as Fortress Investment Group, a highly diversified global investment manager, backed by a $111.1 million loan from Bank of America. The sales deed and the financing with Fortress and Bank of America are matters of public record.
Press reports state that the purchase was a net lease transaction – a strategy in which Fortress specializes – by which Fortress simultaneously entered into a 20-year rental agreement with Millennium. Starwood and Trinity still retain a stake in the park.
The facility will be built in three phases. Existing buildings total more than 400,000 square feet. An additional 866,000 square feet will be dedicated to an advanced manufacturing facility to be completed by 2027.
The somewhat surprising decision to lease space in Spark, originally intended as a life sciences center, to a printer of Pokémon cards came about when brokers acting for the tenant approached the developers, who were willing to consider the idea.
“Our tenant was in high growth mode for advanced manufacturing,” Sheehan said.
“They had been looking for quite some time for a location to consolidate and expand. They needed a certain amount of power, which our site provided, and they wanted this amount of square footage in a central location, which we have.”
Originally envisioned for labs and life sciences research and development, a number of manufacturing shells had already been built.
“But we also thought there could be battery manufacturing, EV manufacturing, or other types of advanced manufacturing,” Sheehan noted.
He declined to state the cost per square foot of the Millennium facility, but said CBRE analysts determined the lease was clearly the highest-dollar lease in the country in 2025.
Before Millennium, Spark already had another tenant signed up. In July 2025, the German company Coriolis Pharma, a provider of formulation R&D services for biologics, announced plans to invest $10 million to establish a 13,000-square-foot state-of-the-art research lab in Spark. It will be the company’s first U.S. facility and headquarters, selected to enable it to be close to its manufacturing partners.
“The decisive factor in our choice of location was the strong scientific fit with the North Carolina ecosystem, a global biotechnology center of excellence. The innovative environment, accelerator platform services, designed to fast-track products from early-stage research to phase 1 clinical readiness,” Coriolis CEO Silvia Steyrer-Gruber stated in a press release.
Spark still has space for new companies, Sheehan noted. Its Nova building is built out for lab and R&D space. In addition, a site has been retained for future manufacturing.
Meanwhile, virtually across the road from Spark, another life sciences park, Pathway Triangle, opened for business in 2024 on a 75-acre, one million square foot campus developed by King Street Properties. The company says it can remove real estate obstacles for advanced manufacturing companies and speed up occupancy by 18 to 24 months by offering tenants speculative, purpose-built, cGMP-compliant facilities. The first two manufacturing buildings are complete.
Pathway will offer an added attraction in the form of a 20,670-square-foot amenity center, offering tenants everything from a café to a putting green.
Novartis, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, will occupy 202,000 square feet in Pathway Triangle – one of its three new facilities to be opened in North Carolina. In addition, Liquidia, a biopharmaceutical company developing innovative therapies for patients with rare cardiopulmonary diseases, has leased 70,000 square feet in the park to expand its manufacturing operations following FDA approval of its YUTREPIA inhalation powder.
Experts say North Carolina did not suffer as badly as other life sciences markets like Boston, San Diego and San Francisco during the severe slowdown of the past two years because it experienced less overbuilding than they did, as well as favorable economic development policies. Meanwhile, Morrisville has secured its place on the biotech map.
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