Construction on the “third floor upfit” for Alamance Community College’s Biotechnology Center of Excellence is expected to get underway in early 2026 in order to provide classroom space for ACC’s newly-launched Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Business Data Analytics programs.
ACC president Dr. Ken Ingle confirmed the timeframe to start construction on the project this week in an interview with The Alamance News. The project is targeted for completion by August 2026, prior to the beginning of the 2026-27 academic year.
The $2.5 million budget to upfit the vacant 7,139-square foot third floor of ACC’s Biotech Center of Excellence, known informally as the Biotech building, will be funded by a grant through the State Capital Infrastructure Fund (SCIF) that the General Assembly established several years ago, ACC officials said during an earlier discussion with the trustees.
The scope of work for the “third floor upfit” project includes the construction of six classrooms, lab space, a (data) server room, and instructional space for the Data Analytics program, according to ACC associate vice president of Administrative Services & Facilities Tom Hartman.
Preliminary construction drawings for the project were submitted this summer for review by the State Construction Office, a division within the state Department of Administration that’s responsible for overseeing public building projects in North Carolina, according to ACC officials.
ACC took the initial steps to launch its program soon after Ingle took over as president in February 2024, making it the third community college in the state at the time to offer an Associate in Applied Science (A.A. S.) in AI, in addition to a three-semester AI certificate program.
Other N.C. community colleges have since followed suit, Ingle pointed out in the interview.
Randolph County commissioners agreed in the spring of 2024 to provide $5 million to renovate an existing building at Randolph Community College into an Applied AI Industrial center.
In addition to ACC, the Asheville-Buncombe, Cape Fear, Davie-Davidson, and Central Piedmont community colleges currently offer two-year degree Associate’s degree programs in AI. Other N.C. community colleges have added individual courses and certificate programs for high school students who are dually-enrolled in Career & College Promise programs, according to the N.C. Community Colleges System.
Guilford Technical Community College is also looking to launch an AI program, Ingle told the newspaper Monday.
While most reports about the potential impact of AI have focused on the elimination of existing jobs, ACC officials have said they’re hoping to its graduates for good-paying jobs in a fast-growing field.
A 2024 Hanover Research report commissioned by N.C A&T State University projected that the number of jobs in AI to grow three times faster than any other employment sector – with approximately 20,000 jobs in the field expected to be created in North Carolina by 2030. As an example, Amazon announced this summer its plans to invest $10 billion in a cloud computing and “AI innovation campus” in Richmond County, creating at least 500 related jobs.
The salary for an entry-level position as an AI feature/prompt engineer, data pipeline technician, automation specialist, and machine learning specialist – all of which ACC’s AI program offers training in – typically ranges from $45,000 (on the low end) to more than $100,000 per year, according to job openings around the state that are currently posted online.
North Carolina ranked second behind Florida among eight Southeastern states in 2024 for the percentages of businesses either currently using AI to augment their operations, according to the N.C. Commerce Department’s Labor and Economic Analysis Division. The most common areas that N.C. businesses reported current or planned use of AI were in marketing automation, language processing, virtual agents – i.e., “chatbots,” and data and text analytics.
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A 2024 analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from the “Business Trends and Outlook Survey” by the state commerce department found that 5.1 percent of businesses in the state were already using AI in their operations, and 6.6 percent of N.C. businesses planned to do so last year.
ACC ‘s trustees had voted earlier this year to hire ThoughtCraft Architects of Durham to design the third floor “upfit” for the Biotech building to provide classrooms for the AI and Data Analytics programs.
The $19.4 million, 32,000-square foot Biotech building at the northern tip of ACC’s Graham campus, near the intersection of I-85/40 with Jimmie Kerr Road, opened in the spring of 2023. Construction of the facility was funded by proceeds from the $39.6 million bond package that voters approved for the community college in November 2018.
ACC’s trustees had agreed at the time to defer completion of the third floor of the Biotech Center due to cost overruns during construction, which the community college’s administration attributed to escalation in labor and construction materials at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Courses in AI and Data Analytics will continue to be taught elsewhere on the Graham campus and online while the third floor of the Biotech building is being finished out, according to ACC’s administration.
Meanwhile, ACC recently marked the completion of another new facility that had been funded by the 2018 bond package, the $19.9 million public safety training center in Green Level.
Other developments
Meanwhile, ACC’s trustees voted 11-0 during their latest meeting earlier this month to approve a request from the ACC Foundation to name an office inside the Scott Family Collection on the third floor of the Gee Building in honor of Peggy Boswell, who retired from ACC in September 2024 after 25 years as curator for the collection. (Trustee Sylvia Munoz was absent from this month’s board meeting, Ingle subsequently confirmed for The Alamance News.)
More than $70,000 has been committed to an endowed scholarship in her name that will provide financial assistance to ACC students who plan to transfer and major in history at a four-year college or university, ACC vice president of Institutional Advancement Carolyn Rhode told the trustees during their latest meeting.
