Jody Meacham of the Silicon Valley Business Journal has written this week about a project that GLDPartners is working on in California. Their lead story: Exclusive: Merced County is developing a 2,000-acre auto tech center for Silicon Valley’s self-driving cars tells the story about how we’re working with Merced County on the development of a large-scale multimodal manufacturing and logistics hub, the Mid-California International Trade District. This complex is slated to be a $1B project that will house 8M square feet of tech-industrial development and about 10,000 jobs.
As a core to the project, the complex is being designed for testing and product development to support the large and fast-growing autotech presence in Silicon Valley. Practically every automaker in the world and hundreds of tech suppliers are clustered in Silicon Valley to access the global talent and to develop next-gen technology in the areas of propulsion, autonomy, safety systems and connected car/infotainment. As California emerges as a global center for the future automotive industry, most suppliers and OEMs are struggling for places to test and develop – it’s become a huge challenge for most, finding purpose-built settings to test and develop close to the research laboratory.
The Merced County project is located 80 miles directly each of Silicon Valley and offers an easy reach for engineers to move back and forth between test and development facilities and research labs. Google has developed a large testing center on the site already for their Waymo operation and a number of others, legacy suppliers, new entrant suppliers and OEMs are planning to use the facility. These companies represent automotive industry players from North America, Europe, Asia and South America. The project is designed to meet a range of test and development field conditions and will have the following test components: an urban grid zone, non-traditional intersections zone, high speed test area and wet-weather/special testing zone. The complex will also include a series of secure tech-connected buildings that will be used for field test staging, development, and computational evaluation.
Importantly, the development is being built as a true quadra-modal project with direct access to high-speed commercial road corridors, direct access to transcontinental rail (via BNSF and UPRR), a commercial airport with an onsite 12,000 foot runway and onward several hour connections to global seaports in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
The objective of the autotech test and development project is to provide global companies that are undertaking R&D in Silicon Valley a world-class center to field test and develop new technology. An important secondary objective is to provide a business competitive business product to support production of tech product parts and components. Beyond autotech, the project houses and will attract companies involved in manufacturing industrial machinery, specialty chemicals, commercial space systems, medical products and food products.
Support for the project includes the participation from various research institutions including UC Berkeley, USC, Carnegie-Mellon and UC Merced.
A summary of the SVBJ article is below.
Article link: Exclusive: Merced County is developing a 2,000-acre auto tech center for Silicon Valley’s self-driving cars
Merced County is in the process of developing a 2,000-acre site encompassing the former Castle Air Force Base, which it hopes will become the center for testing, development and manufacturing of automotive technology, including for many of the self-driving cars being developed in Silicon Valley.
Adam Wasserman, managing partner of Scottsdale, Arizona-based GLDPartners, which consults with international companies on optimizing their supply chains, said the project expects to announce its first tenant — likely linked to Silicon Valley’s efforts on autonomous driving R&D — by early fall.
Google is already using a 91-acre site for its own autonomous car testing program adjacent to the planned Mid-California AutoTech Testing, Development and Production Campus, county officials said.
At full build-out, the development plan calls for 8 million square feet of industrial space employing about 9,300 people.
