If you've ever wanted to buy a chip factory, now's your chance! The chip fab that used to belong to SK Hynix up until 2015 but shut down in 2008 is up for auction with a starting bid of $1.5 million, as reported by Oregon Live Tuesday.
The fab is at 1830 Willow Creek Circle in Eugene, Oregon and has a floor space of 1.2 million square feet. it has a huge amount of excess land available for further expansion and comes with one clean room, which could be helpful, for example, for the pharmaceutical industry, of 122,000 square feet.
The property also has a lot of power access with two 42MW substations for 84MW of power, has access to high-speed internet, as well as a water discharge capacity of 1.2 million gallons per day. The property even comes with some of the old infrastructure for 200mm wafer manufacturing, according to the listing.
Eugene Technology Center's History
SK Hynix initially opened the factory in 1998 with a $1.5 billion investment. A decade later, SK Hynix closed the factory with roughly 1,400 losing jobs, according to the Oregon publication
After this, the fab remained unused for years until 2015, when Avago, now known as Broadcom, bought the fab for $21 million. However, Avago changed its tune about re-opening the fab the next year.
Following that, Corning (the company that makes the Gorilla Glass in your phone), bought the factory for $13.4 million but did not end up using it for anything.
Fast forward three years to today, and the factory is once again for sale, this time with the auction opening at just $1.5 million. If you want in, you'll have to pay a $25,000 participation deposit to cast your bid from March 23 through March 25, 2020.
