Tek Park, a hub of technological innovation in the Lehigh Valley for nearly four decades, was sold to a new owner that plans an expansion there, which it projects could lead to up to 100 new permanent jobs. 
TierPoint purchased the nine-building, 137-acre campus in Upper Macungie Township in October. Based in St. Louis, the company is a leading national enterprise data center company and provider of secure, connected IT platform solutions.
Tek Park opened at 9999 Hamilton Blvd. in 1988 as the world headquarters of AT&T Optoelectronic. It’s where AT&T’s Bell Laboratory division, a pioneer in developing technology that powers the world today, developed circuits and devices for light-wave transmission. Decades earlier, in 1951, Bell Lab’s Western Electric plant not far away in Allentown was the first in the world to mass produce transistors, the forerunner to semiconductors.
Companies operating at Tek Park today include Broadcom, a national semiconductor designer and producer that has been growing amid the boom in artificial intelligence.
The property includes a data center, which TierPoint previously had leased, the largest by total power capacity of its portfolio of centers in more than 20 markets. TierPoint said it has started a 100-megawatt expansion of that data center, which it expects to complete in the second half of next year.
“TierPoint continues to build on its exceptional growth trajectory, with strong demand for our digital infrastructure solutions, including market-leading enterprise, wholesale, and high-density colocation services that support artificial intelligence and other compute-intensive workloads,” TierPoint Chair and CEO Jerry Kent said in a statement.
In response to questions from Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC), TierPoint said the Tek Park campus affords the company and its clients “with convenient, quality opportunities for further expansion to support growing demand.”
Long-term, as its business at Tek Park grows, TierPoint projected that it and its clients could add up to 100 new permanent jobs. It said the expansion project, including work on the utility substation, could support an estimated 350 or more construction and engineering jobs.
Tek Park is a monumental location in Lehigh Valley’s history of driving innovation for new technology.
Components in the first iPhone originated in the Lehigh Valley. Products including the USB were developed here, along with conductivity like firewire for Apple computers, Bluetooth, or Read Channel, which are state of the art for reading hard disk drives. Voice switches and T1 transport, which for decades managed nearly every phone call in the country, originated in the Lehigh Valley.
That long list of accomplishments was celebrated in November 2023 at LVEDC’s Fall Signature Event, “Lehigh Valley’s Technology Sector: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”
Semiconductor technology firms operating in the Lehigh Valley include AAYUNA, Broadcom, Cisco, Coherent, Infinera (part of Nokia), iDEAL Semiconductor, and Intel. Collectively, the industry employs about 1,500 people who are developing, producing, and assembling semiconductors that are relied on by brands such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, AWS, AT&T, Verizon, Netflix, and Nokia.
Together, they are creating solutions that allow data and electricity to be transmitted faster, with less heat, in smaller hardware. Those solutions are powering the devices that Americans take for granted in their daily lives, such as computers, vehicles, home appliances, smartphones, and movie streaming services, and support the secure, efficient transmission of wireless voice and data communications.
AT&T chose to build Tek Park in the Lehigh Valley because of its proximity to research and development facilities in Murray Hill, N.J., and AT&T manufacturing plants in Allentown and Reading at the time.
AT&T spun off its telecommunications and equipment business in 1996, passing the property to Lucent Technologies and then its spinoff, Agere Systems. In 2003, TriQuint Semiconductor bought Agere’s optics division and inherited the campus.
The property has passed through multiple owners since then, including MRA Group, which built its reputation primarily as a health care real estate firm. MRA developed the property for single-tenant sites of 50,000 square feet or less and landed tenants including Aesculap Biologics and Aesculap Implant Systems, members of the B. Braun family of companies.
TierPoint purchased Tek Park from Hamilton 9999 Associates LP, according to real estate data and analytics provider CoStar Group. The sale price was $175 million.
(Bottom photo by Donna Fisher Photography)