Solid-state flash memory company Solidigm announced a permanent layoff of 98 employees at its new headquarters in Rancho Cordova.
The company this year moved its headquarters from San Jose to Rancho Cordova, where it's building out a research and development campus and offices.
“Solidigm executed a workforce reduction across all business groups and locations due to the prolonged downturn in the semiconductor industry and its impact on market conditions,” said Solidigm spokeswoman Catherine Roberts, via email.
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. As part of SK hynix's deal with Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Solidigm took about 800 employees out of Intel, many of them from its Folsom campus.
Roberts said the impacted employees have been notified, and some will be ending their work with the company this month. Solidigm is offering placement support and severance packages to the departing employees, she said. "We are immensely grateful to our team members who have made meaningful contributions while at Solidigm, and they will be greatly missed."
Solidigm started moving employees into its Rancho Cordova campus in February. By May, the company had about 1,000 local workers and a total of about 2,000 employees in 13 offices around the world.
The global economic slowdown that started last year cut into demand for memory chips, leaving chip companies with too much supply and causing prices to fall.
SK hynix, of which Solidigm is a stand-alone U.S. subsidiary, reported its largest quarterly loss in over a decade in the first quarter this year, in what was the company’s second consecutive losing quarter.
The world’s largest memory chipmaker, Samsung Electronics Co., as well as memory chipmaker Micron Technologies Inc., have reported cutting production to reduce inventories.
Solidigm last year leased three buildings with a total of 230,000 square feet of office space in the White Rock Corporate Campus in Rancho Cordova, and began extensive tenant improvements. The investment in local labs and offices is more than $100 million, the company said last year. Solidigm anticipated then that it would grow its local operation to 1,900 employees by 2027.
Solidigm’s Rancho Cordova offices are among a cluster of chip research and design labs in the region, which also include Intel's large R&D offices and Micron's (Nasdaq: MU) operations in Folsom. It also includes TSI Semiconductors' plant in Roseville, which German industrial company Bosch has agreed to acquire with plans to perform a $1.5 billion upgrade to fabricate next-generation electric vehicle chips.
Intel’s Folsom campus has more than 5,300 employees and is the region's largest tech employer. The Folsom Micron offices employ about 300, and TSI has about 150 employees.
