Solid-state flash memory chip company Solidigm has moved its headquarters to Rancho Cordova, where it's building a research and development campus and offices.
The headquarters moved from San Jose because Rancho Cordova will be home to the largest number of employees, said Catherine Roberts, spokeswoman for Solidigm, via email.
"Once complete, our campus will be Solidigm’s largest global site. We see great potential for the region to continue being a vibrant technology hub," she said.
The company is not maintaining its San Jose location, she said. Those employees have been working remotely.
Solidigm has leased three buildings with a total of 230,000 square feet of office space in the White Rock Corporate Campus in Rancho Cordova. The company should be moving into the first of those buildings this month. The investment in local labs and offices is more than $100 million, the company said.
Solidigm was created as a new company in 2021 when South Korean chip company SK hynix bought the flash memory business of Intel Corp. for $9 billion.
SK hynix is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory chips and flash memory chips. It's the world's second-largest maker of memory chips.
Solidigm took about 800 employees out of Intel, many of them from its Folsom campus.
The Solidigm employees have been working in temporary space or remotely. There are about 1,000 Solidigm employees now tied to the Rancho Cordova office, and the company anticipates growing the operation to 1,900 employees locally by 2027.
The addition of Solidigm’s Rancho Cordova offices adds to the chip research and design labs in the region, which include the large R&D offices in Folsom of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Micron Technology Inc. Intel’s local campus has more than 5,300 employees and is the region's largest tech employer. The local Micron (Nasdaq: MU) offices employ about 300. The local Micron operation was also spun out of Intel.
“Solidigm is a cutting-edge leader in the semiconductor space and locating their global headquarters here is an economic game-changer for Rancho Cordova and the Sacramento region," said Rancho Cordova Mayor Linda Budge, in a news release from the Greater Sacramento Economic Council.
“This validates the state capital market as being one of the top locations in the country for semiconductor talent," said Barry Broome, CEO of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council.
He said that actual large-scale chip manufacturing may be difficult in the region because it requires so much water, but the cluster of research labs for chip design and development may provide an opportunity for the region to develop a cluster of chip designers and engineers. And while the region might not be the sight of any of the mutlibillion-dollar domestic chip plants that are being developed with incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, there are companies considering building 200,000-square foot chip fabrication plants in the area.
When Solidigm was considering where to put its offices, part of the attraction of the region was its educated workforce, Broome said, adding that the deans of the engineering schools of the University of California Davis and California State University Sacramento were part of those discussions.
