HGST Expanding Historic South San Jose Campus

Nathan Donato-Weinstein from the Silicon Valley Business Journal nabbed an exclusive on the HGST expansion. This historic campus in South San Jose was birthed by IBM in 1956 and was the location where the "flying disk drive" was invented. Now owned by Western Digital, HGST is going to demolish about a million SQFT of outdated space, rehab the remaining structures, and build two new modern buildings. One will be a 15,000 SQFT R&D space while the other will be a 185,000 SQFT office building.

The new buildings will be relatively tall for these types of campuses. The office building will rise up to six stories and the R&D space will probably be four. The architect says there is interest in doing more than "just retaining a manufacturing-style, low-rise model." It sounds like they want to enhance the aesthetics of the overall neighborhood, which is a nice change of pace for these types of projects. I'll look forward to the first set of renders.

Next to the HGST campus, several housing projects are under construction with hundreds (if not thousands) of homes. A new retail center anchored by Target is also in the works, and the area does have access to both Light Rail and Caltrain.

Source: SVBJ