Northeastern University held a groundbreaking ceremony Friday to mark construction on a new campus in Portland, Maine, that’ll allow it to more than double the student body at that location.

The Roux Institute’s new campus will mark a major step forward for Northeastern. The institute opened in 2020 thanks to a $100 million donation from technology entrepreneur David Roux, as well as another $100 million gift months later.

The institute has been operating out of a 44,000-square-foot space in Portland it rented from the financial technology firm WEX, one of more than 10 corporate partners of the institute.

The school has 800 students today, but it expects to have room for 2,000 when the new campus is done in 2028.

Already, 340 students have graduated, seven university research teams have begun operations, partnerships have been established with more than 200 companies and 82 startups have joined an incubator program.

“Our mission is to be a driver of the future Maine economy,” the Roux Institute’s chief administrative officer, Chris Mallett, said in an interview.

The new campus will be built across Portland’s Back Cove, amid an otherwise largely residential area that also includes the Maine Yacht Center and which has high visibility from I-295. Northeastern will build on a waterfront location spanning more than 13 acres that was once home to B&M Baked Beans, which had a cannery there.

Most of the new space will be in a new 245,000-square-foot multipurpose building that’ll include both academic and start-up incubator spaces. The new building will be modeled after a facility on Northeastern’s Boston campus, the Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex. Mallett said the plan is for learning, research, collaboration and entrepreneurship to all take place side-by-side.

“A larger permanent home for the university’s efforts in Maine is essential,” Mallett said.

The five-story B&M Baked Beans building will be renovated into a new incubator space. The campus will be built by Milford-based Consigli Construction. The university didn’t disclose total construction costs.

Other site work will include bike and pedestrian paths connecting to existing networks, including through a planned bridge that’ll connect with the Eastern Promenade, running alongside Tukey’s Bridge, which carries I-295 across the water. Waterfront access will also be returned to a site that Mallett said has been closed to the public for more than a century, and geothermal wells are planned to provide enough energy for the campus’s typical use.

The Roux Institute is a departure for Maine higher education, which has long been defined by the prestigious liberal education campuses farther north overseen by Bates, Bowdoin and Colby colleges. The institute, with graduate and certificate programs only, has a heavy STEM focus, with most students studying computer and data sciences, bioinformatics or applied analytics.

More than half the Roux Institute’s students are from Maine, Mallett said, though they also come from more than 20 countries in total.

David and Barbara Roux, the couple for which the campus is named, had searched for years for the right university with which to partner on an educational initiative in their home state. David Roux is a former chief executive of the private equity firm Silver Lake.

The Portland-based Harold Alfond Foundation contributed another $100 million later in 2020. The foundation, which benefits health, education and community development in Maine, is named for a late Swampscott native who later ran the Dexter Shoe Co. and became a philanthropist.

The Portland campus is one of a growing network of 13 Northeastern locations that most recently includes additions in Oakland, London and New York.