Intel to sell Fort Collins building; local plans unclear

FORT COLLINS — Intel Corp. will sell the sprawling facility in southeast Fort Collins that it bought in 2006, but a city official said that doesn’t mean it’s leaving Northern Colorado.

The 203,391-square-foot building on 29.36 acres at 4701-4721 Technology Parkway, southeast of the intersection of Harmony and Ziegler roads, is advertised for sale by Denver-based Colliers Real Estate Services, which describes the plant as an “owner/user purchase opportunity.”

Neither agents from Colliers nor Intel officials in Fort Collins and California responded to requests for comment. However, SeonAh Kendall, the city of Fort Collins’ director of economic health, told BizWest that “we don’t have any cause for concern right now.”

As far as she knows, Kendall said, the decision by Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), which supplies microprocessors for most manufacturers of computer systems, has more to do with an increasing number of employees working remotely since the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are working with and talking with the Intel folks here about what that looks like,” Kendall said. “With the pandemic and the ability to work from anywhere, they were seeing that as an opportunity to kind of re-evaluate.”

She said Intel has indicated that it will still need a physical presence in Northern Colorado, but questions about how big or where have yet to be answered.

“They’re going to be waiting for the sale of that site,” she said. “Hopefully, we can find them a site and folks looking for them can find a landing site.”

The company, which employs around 300 people in Fort Collins, is looking to downsize its facility, but “not in terms of headcount,” she said. “It really is a work-from-home issue.”

After reaching an agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co. to hire its Fort Collins-based Itanium processor design team, which had been leasing space on the HP campus, Intel bought the building on Technology Parkway in December 2006 from Celestica International Holdings, which built the plant across from the HP campus in 1997 after buying HP’s Fort Collins-based printed-circuit assembly operations. Intel’s 400 workers were moved to their new home in 2007, and a report in 2009 in the Northern Colorado Business Report, which was merged with the Boulder County Business Report in 2014 to become BizWest, indicated that the Intel workforce there had grown to 420.

Reuters reported early last year that Intel had cut employee and executive pay, and The Wall Street Journal said in October that the company was beginning targeted job cuts and aimed to reduce costs by $3 billion in 2023. However, the state could win upward of $5.5 billion through the CHIPS and SCIENCE Act of 2022, according to the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. The semiconductor industry also got a boost when the Colorado Legislature enacted House Bill 23-1260 to incentivize investments in the state with $75 million over five years.

Intel’s facility and most of the Harmony Road corridor fall within Fort Collins’ CHIPS Zone, the first in the state, that was created last year to help semiconductor businesses access incentives under the federal Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, launched in 2022. The Colorado General Assembly passed a CHIPS Zone Act in 2023.

Fort Collins’ CHIPS Zone is bounded by Prospect Road on the north, Interstate 25 on the east, Precision Drive on the south and College Avenue on the west.

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