The shuttered Hynix computer chip factory sold at auction last week for $6.3 million, but it’s not clear what the new owner plans to do with the 200-acre site.

Hynix spent $1.5 billion to build and equip the 1.2-million-square-foot factory, which opened in 1998. It operated for a decade before closing permanently in 2008 during a downturn in the memory chip market. The closure left 1,400 people out of work, one of the biggest mass layoffs in Oregon history.

The plant sold twice in the years after the closure, for $31 million and $13.4 million, but prior buyers abandoned plans to revive manufacturing on the site. The property went up for auction again last week.

The new owner is an Ohio digital sign company called Stratacache.

“We are in a dialogue with several different economic agencies throughout Oregon about our plans for this,” said Andrea Poley, Stratacache’s manager of global communications.

The coronavirus outbreak has slowed those conversations, Poley wrote in an email Tuesday, and she said Stratacache won’t provide any additional detail on its plans for the time being. But she said “we do have an outlook and see future uses of the property.”

Economic development officials in Eugene have long hoped a new owner could revive the Hynix property, either as a factory that would bring in new manufacturing jobs or perhaps as a data center that might not employ many but could at least put the facility to use again.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699

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