Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) today announced its strategy to create a disk drive "mega manufacturing center" in Shenzhen.

The new facility will represent an investment of up to $500 million when fully realized, and align disk drive final assembly with existing Shenzhen-based component manufacturing and an extensive supplier network. Hitachi expects the manufacturing center to employ nearly 7,000 people in its first phase to meet the growing demand for hard disk drives. The project, which initially includes construction of a 35,000-square-meter manufacturing facility, is expected to begin in Q4 2004.

The new facility is expected to start production of 3.5" disk drives in Q4 2005 and, ultimately, will be capable of producing disk drives of varying form factors, giving Hitachi GST the flexibility required to meet future demand in the traditional IT and consumer segments. It will employ state-of-the-art manufacturing processes that support the highly technical disk drive industry.