Nissan’s (NSANY) push to expand its US manufacturing efforts comes as rival Toyota (TM) made big news this week. 

Toyota announced on Monday it will invest $3.6 billion to add a second assembly line at its San Antonio plant, creating 2,000 jobs and shifting Tacoma production out of one of its Mexico plants and into Texas over the next four years.  The San Antonio plant will eventually be the exclusive US home of the Tundra, Sequoia, and Tacoma production.

President Trump praised the announcement on Truth Social: “Toyota is moving from Mexico to the United States (Texas!). A really big deal. Tariffs at work!”

The move comes after the White House said it wouldn’t renew the landmark USMCA trade deal with the US, Mexico, and Canada, meaning new negotiations are coming.

Despite this, Nissan has a version of the same “build-in-America” playbook already underway, and its CEO credited it for one of the bright spots in Nissan’s turnaround. 

“We started with around 45% of our mix being produced in the US,” Ivan Espinosa said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “We ended the year with 60%. So the strategy is working.” Nissan has said elsewhere it’s targeting 80% domestic production within four to five years.

Nissan operates three major plants in the US — two in Tennessee and another in Canton, Mississippi.

And the company’s sales strategy is working in the US too.

“We have 16 months of consistent growth year over year,” Espinosa said of the US market, where Nissan is targeting 10% sales growth this year and 1 million units by 2027. “The strategy is working.”

Trump’s tariffs played a big part in the production shift. Espinosa said Nissan paid $1.6 billion in tariffs in 2025 alone, even as the company’s operating margin held roughly steady with the prior year. Localizing more production and shaving costs elsewhere helped offset the hit.

But Nissan’s version of “build in America” can’t include all of its cars. It’s an issue facing many brands that assemble in multiple regions, especially those trying to hit affordability goals. Espinosa said Nissan is doubling down on cost reduction for the Sentra and Kicks; however, both are still built in Mexico, and the company isn’t planning to move production north of the border. 

“These products under the $30,000 price point have thin profit margins,” he said, calling a Mexico-to-US shift for those models “impractical.” 

With the White House declining to extend USMCA, Espinosa said Nissan’s answer is to keep its manufacturing footprint flexible rather than fully re-shored, something he called a deliberate choice after resizing the company’s plant network from 17 to 10.