Officials with electric carmaker Faraday Future announced Monday that they have signed a lease for a building in a central California farming town outside of Fresno, officially ending suspense that they might put a smaller-scale factory in Nevada after scrapping bigger plans here earlier this summer.

The startup plans to manufacture cars out of a 1 million-square-foot plant in Hanford, California, that used to produce Pirelli tires but has been mostly vacant since a shutdown in 2001. Employees traveled up from company headquarters in the Los Angeles area over the weekend to help work on site cleanup.

“Our new production facility is the latest demonstration of our commitment to getting FF 91 on the road by the end of 2018,” Dag Reckhorn, Faraday Future’s VP of Global Manufacturing, said in a statement. “Despite significant headwinds on the path ahead of us, we are laser-focused on that one key milestone.”

Faraday announced last month that it wouldn’t pursue plans to build a $1 billion factory at North Las Vegas’ Apex Industrial Park because its primary backer, Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, had run into money troubles. But it wanted to push forward toward its deadline with a more modest plan — starting manufacturing in an existing building either in California or Nevada.

Steve Hill of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, which played a key role in initially attracting Faraday to Nevada, said Monday’s announcement was expected and he didn’t have “a lot of additional disappointment” over it.

“If there had been an option that would have made sense for them, we certainly would’ve liked them to do that, but I don’t really think there was,” he said. “We don’t have million-square-foot buildings.”

A $335 million legislatively approved package of abatements and infrastructure improvements — available to Faraday once they made major progress on the factory — is still technically on the books. Hill said the company, which says it hopes to someday fulfill its original plan of building in North Las Vegas, was still considering its options on severing the agreement.

While road improvements near Apex are moving forward, there’s been little additional progress in the past month on upgrading the park with water service and other utilities that could catalyze development, Hill said. But there are some prospects that could potentially fill Faraday’s gap as anchor tenant and kickstart the infrastructure projects.

“Faraday’s announcement that they weren’t moving forward here right now piqued the interest of a couple of companies that do have an interest in being at Apex, potentially. We’ve been in several conversations with companies about that possibility,” Hill said. “But it’s still pretty early in the process.”