The chemical know-how and machines that spooled out countless kilometers of film are being eyed for medical marijuana and solar cells, while a private rail line now carries tomatoes alongside coal as photography pioneer Kodak, its bankruptcy behind it, embraces a new role: startup landlord.
The 127-year-old company had buildings and infrastructure to rival a small city when digital photography bumped its familiar yellow boxes from tourists’ camera bags and took over much of Hollywood.
However, rather than selling off its sprawling, 5.18km2 Kodak Park campus, the company has become landlord to 58 diverse companies — and counting — that have been courted with the promise of plentiful utilities, its own railroad and unique access to Kodak’s specialty technical and industrial capabilities.
“There is tremendous value in being able to repurpose the assets that exist here,” said Michael Alt, the retiring director of the renamed Eastman Business Park.
For example, tenant Natcore Technology Inc can tap Kodak’s film-coating capability in its development of solar cells, and LiDestri Food & Beverage uses Kodak’s short-line railroad, which brings coal to the on-site power plant, to haul the tomatoes it processes into pasta sauces and salsa.
Two medical marijuana companies want to put pharmaceutical-grade dispensaries in vacant buildings on the site if New York awards them licenses later this summer.
No one expects the site to again reach its 30,000-worker peak, but estimates of 10,000 to 11,000 employees in a few years are seen as realistic. About 6,000 people now work there, roughly 1,200 of them Kodak employees.
Alt describes the site’s 125-megawatt power plant — capacity enough to serve the equivalent of 100,000 homes — its own water purification plant, wastewater treatment facility, fire department, and chemical and testing labs as amenities that let startup companies target investment toward their specific needs and get to market more quickly. With the 20-month Chapter 11 bankruptcy nearly two years in its past, companies scared off by Kodak’s uncertain future have found reassurance, he and others said.
“One of the things that appealed to us was that Kodak had roll-to-roll equipment that they used in making photo film that they do not use any more because of digital cameras,” said David Rutkin, spokesman for Natcore, which is relocating its corporate headquarters from Red Bank, New Jersey, to Rochester. “One of the things on our radar are flexible solar cells ... and they would be made using the same equipment.”
New York state has so far committed US$100 million to efforts to reinvent the park to a multi-tenant, multi-use site. About half of that funds an environmental trust created last year to clean up and monitor damage to the land and Genesee River from more than a century of filmmaking. Kodak’s share of the trust is US$49 million.
The other state funding has taken the form of tax incentives and grants for the tenant businesses considered crucial to tipping the 506-hectare site from community liability to asset.
“It was a potential challenge to have such a large footprint in the heart of our community potentially go idle or not be leveraged properly,” said Mark Peterson, a member of the Finger Lakes Regional Council created by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to drive economic development in the area.
The council has made the Eastman Business Park its top priority for the past four years.
On Saturday, demolition work on some of the older buildings continued with the implosion of Kodak Building 53, turning it into a pile of rubble.
Given Kodak’s decline, the site also offers plentiful skilled labor. All but one of Natcore’s six lab employees had previously worked for Kodak.
Kodak last year announced plans to sell the business park, but took it off the market in spring this year and has now made it a separate division. The decision followed Kodak’s commitment to grow its remaining motion picture and commercial film business, which requires a hefty 1,219 square kilometers of space, Alt said.
At the federal level, Democratic Representative Louise Slaughter has nudged the US Department of Defense, Department of Energy and others to take notice. The Eastman Business Park and the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory last month announced a collaboration that is to give startup companies access to resources at either facility.
The work of former Kodak engineers using 35-year-old repurposed equipment contributed, for example, to the development of night-vision goggles like those used during the raid that killed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Slaughter said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to