History 2004: Hitachi GST HQs to Move to San Jose’s Evergreen District

Following Hitachi’s acquisition of IBM’s HDD drive business in December 2002, now known as Hitachi GST , we’ve been wondering how long it would take the Japanese firm to pull its HQ operations out of IBM’s site on Cottle Road in San Jose, CA, originally purchased by IBM in 1955.

As usual, however, HGST prefers to move discreetly without making waves. The HQ and US R&D activities will remain in San Jose, but will be relocating to a 377,000 square foot modern campus at 3400 Yerba Buena Road, in the Evergreen District, near Evergreen College, after a lease-and-renovate arrangement for the former Dade Behring facility, while retaining development, manufacturing and operations at the Cottle Road office, and more specifically everything relating to the manufacture of wafers, disks and heads.

The company plans to spend $250 million in the new HQs and research campus and also to renovate portions of the Cottle Road site over the next 10 years.

HGST numbers 24,000 employees WW. Of the 2,800 at Cottle Road, 500 will relocate to the Yerba Buena campus, along with the 150 or so still working at IBM’s Almaden Research Center at 650 Harry Road, in the San Jose hills.

Among its other reorganization plans, HGST last November began transferring a significant portion of its Hitachi-originated enterprise HDD plant in Laguna, Philippines to Singapore, in a facility established by IBM in 1994 which hosts some 2,000 people.

Finally, in light of the boom in demand for its one-inch 4GB HDDs, particularly for Apple’s iPod mini, HGST will spend $200 million over several years at its Thailand facilities in order to double production capacity to 60 million units annually, including around 8 million one-inch Microdrives, but also the 2.5-inch Travelstar and 3.5-inch Deskstar product lines.

The company currently employs 7,000 people in its own Prachinburi facility and another 5,000 through a contract partner, Union Technology, a Saha Union company for 2.5- and 3.5-inch units based in Sriracha. The total of 12,000 Thai workers will expand to 16,000 to support the planned manufacturing increase.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 197 on June 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.