SK hynix America has scooped up a large industrial building in south San Jose, paying about $49.5 million for 5981 Optical Court. Public documents show the deal closed April 30, and the two-story structure had been sitting empty after a solar-roof company moved out. The purchase puts a sizable, manufacturing-capable property back in the hands of a chipmaker with existing local operations.
Deal confirmed in public filings
Documents filed at the Santa Clara County Recorder show the sale was recorded last Thursday and that the two-story, roughly 112,000-square-foot building sold for $49.5 million, according to The Mercury News. The buyer is listed as SK hynix America, the U.S. subsidiary of South Korea’s SK hynix Inc.
Property history and value
An affiliate of Peninsula Land & Capital bought the property in 2021 for about $32.1 million, according to property listings and tax records on Compass. County assessment rolls pegged the building at roughly $34 million in January 2025, so the latest sale price comes in at about a 46 percent premium over that valuation, a sizable jump for a formerly vacant site.
Why a chipmaker might want the space
SK hynix is a global memory-chip manufacturer with U.S. research and sales operations in Silicon Valley, as outlined on Wikipedia. The company has been quietly expanding its local footprint for years, and public filings show SK hynix previously bought 11 acres next to its North San Jose headquarters in 2018, as reported by The Mercury News. That pattern helps explain why a ready-built, manufacturing-capable facility in South San Jose would be an appealing target.
San Jose real-estate ripple
The deal lands in the middle of a broader reshuffling of San Jose commercial real estate, as investors and tech firms increasingly chase lab, manufacturing and R&D space instead of traditional offices. Recent reporting has highlighted similar moves, including multi-building campus trades and one-off property grabs that point to selective demand for plug-in industrial sites, per The Real Deal and a marked-down Rio Tech Park sale.
SK hynix has not publicly disclosed what it plans to do with the Optical Court building, so the property’s next chapter is still open. For South San Jose, though, the purchase is another sign that chipmakers and their affiliates are still hungry for buildings that can support engineering, testing and light manufacturing work.
