Let’s raise a glass to Genentech’s press release today that they are expanding here in Hillsboro, Oregon. In an era when local economic headlines too often celebrate empty concrete bunkers and automated server racks, our community received a genuine, earth-shaking piece of great news today.
Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, officially announced a massive $750 million investment to expand its manufacturing operations right here on its 75-acre campus on NE Brookwood Parkway. The project will construct a brand-new device fill-finish manufacturing facility, doubling the footprint of the company’s local site and bringing end-to-end drug delivery capabilities to Oregon. The new plant will manufacture vital drug-delivery systems, including prefilled syringes and autoinjectors, enabling patients worldwide to receive critical treatments in oncology, immunology, and neurology outside hospital settings.
Best of all: commercial operations, slated to begin in 2031, will create approximately 250 permanent, high-wage manufacturing jobs and support roughly 200 construction jobs during the buildout.
Genentech CEO Ashley Magargee gave credit where it belongs:
“We are proud to make this significant new investment in Hillsboro, building on nearly two decades of Genentech manufacturing in Oregon. Thanks to its skilled workforce and strong community, Hillsboro remains vital to our U.S. operations.”
Governor Tina Kotek and Hillsboro Mayor Beach Pace echoed the sentiment, praising Genentech’s twenty-year track record of supporting local STEM education, community giving, and living-wage careers.
This is what community-building looks like. Genentech has been a stellar neighbor since 2006, and its decision to anchor their future here should be celebrated from Orenco to Downtown.
The Contrast: Human Beings vs. Server Racks
Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room—and why Genentech’s announcement is a ringing alarm bell for anyone paying attention to the future of Hillsboro.
Take a hard look at Genentech’s campus. Of their 75 acres, roughly 20 acres are designated as protected wetlands and are used for an on-site solar array, leaving about 55 usable acres.
On those 55 acres, Genentech currently supports around 1,200 workers across technical manufacturing, packaging, quality control, distribution, and patient support. With this 250-job expansion, that campus will support roughly 1,450 local workers.
Do the math: that is over 26 high-paying, middle-class-supporting jobs per usable acre.
Now, do a simple flyover of North Hillsboro and look at what our city has been approving with open arms: massive, anonymous, windowless hyperscale data centers and potential automated AI compute warehouses. Every Red Dot on that photo above is a potential employment center, but the opportunity and the land is now lost forever.
Factor | Genentech Advanced Biomanufacturing (55 Usable Acres) | Typical North Hillsboro Data Center Campus (20–60 Acres) |
Total Permanent On-Site Jobs | ~1,450 workers (post-expansion) | ~30 to 50 workers (total across all shifts) |
Job Density Per Acre | ~26.4 jobs/acre | ~0.5 to 0.8 jobs/acre |
Direct Community Benefit | 1,450 paychecks buying homes, dining locally, and funding local schools | Minimal local payroll circulation; automated compute clusters |
Primary Resource Use | Converts energy and water into life-saving medical devices | Sinks hundreds of Megawatts of power and millions of gallons of water into cooling servers |
True Economic Return | Multi-shift technical careers for local families | Massive tax breaks traded away for single-digit shift crews |
Data center developers and their high-priced lobbyists love to hide behind the buzzword “advanced tech manufacturing” to capture property tax abatements and prime industrial zoning. But federal classifications recognize the truth: data centers are information-hosting services, not manufacturing. They don’t make things. They house humming circuit boards, guarded by a handful of security staff and an HVAC technician on a golf cart.
The 600-Acre Wake-Up Call
Right now, data center operators are on track to complete the conversion of 600 acres of prime industrial land in North Hillsboro. Under Oregon’s Land Use System (Senate Bill 100) and our strict Urban Growth Boundaries, flat, shovel-ready industrial land with water, sewer, and high-voltage electrical hookups is not infinite. It is one of the rarest, most precious public assets we possess. Once it is paved over with reinforced concrete bunkers and dedicated substations, it is gone forever.
Look at the devastating trade-off we are making and have made:
- If those 600 acres were preserved for true advanced manufacturing like Genentech, biotech, clean energy, and precision fabrication (at ~26 jobs/acre), they would support over 15,600 permanent, high-wage jobs for local families.
- Paved over for data centers (at ~0.75 jobs/acre), those same 600 acres will yield a meager 450 total jobs.
We are on the verge of trading away 15,000 family-wage livelihoods for a wasteland of silent server barns.
Who We Want in Hillsboro—And Who Hasn’t Earned It
Hillsboro has always been a proud, hard-working town. We welcome employers who invest in our people, hire our kids out of local high schools and colleges, support our food banks, and create careers that allow people to actually afford to live in Washington County.Genentech has proven for two decades that they belong here. They value our workforce, respect our environment, and deliver the kind of human-centered prosperity that sustains a city.Data center conglomerates, on the other hand, have taken hundreds of millions in tax breaks, monopolized our electrical substations, sucked up our municipal water capacity, and returned almost nothing in terms of actual employment. They don’t show up to local ballgames. Their “workforce” doesn’t buy groceries at WinCo, patronize our downtown restaurants, or buy homes in our neighborhoods.
The Time for Siting Controls is Right Now
The Hillsboro City Council is meeting now to consider restrictions on additional Data Centers and AI Computing facilities for a number of reasons, including noise, vibration, and pollution. This “Good News” is more of a wake-up call than ever before for local and state leaders! We must stop the madness and implement emergency siting restrictions before our remaining industrial reserves vanish:
- Establish Strict Job-Density Floors: Require any development on prime general industrial land to guarantee a minimum threshold of permanent, on-site living-wage jobs per acre. If a company can’t deliver the jobs, they don’t get the land.
- Cap Data Center Acreage: Place an immediate, hard cap on the total acreage and power capacity available for data centers within Hillsboro’s industrial sanctuaries.
- Protect Strategic Land for Real Manufacturing: Reserve shovel-ready parcels exclusively for biopharma, medical tech, robotics, and clean physical manufacturing.
- End the Incentive Handouts: Strip enterprise zone property tax breaks from automated server storage. Tax incentives should reward job creation, not job automation.
Genentech just showed us what real economic leadership looks like. It’s time for the City of Hillsboro to show the same wisdom and protect our land for the people who actually live and work here. The work is happening, and yes, we have been foolish, and our politicians and staff have been flat-footed. The blame game is pointless, but fixing this is an EMERGENCY; we need to treat it as such and do it now!
Kudos to Genentech, the City of Hillsboro, and our residents. Wherever you are tonight, this article is designed to spark real talk and real discussions, which is why we bring you news that goes much deeper than any other outlet. That is why we call this Column “The Real Story”.
A true “economic engine” doesn’t need to keep calling itself that to anyone within earshot: It needs to build a stable, reliable labor base that can withstand the cyclical nature of any one industry. The state and local economies that recovered best from the pandemic had exactly that diverse economic base. Those that haven’t are where we see some of the fiercest fights over data centers as governments approved them to patch holes in the local economy without adding population.
Kudos, Dirk. This is one of your best articles with spot on evaluations of the current critical status of Hillsboro’s future. You describe perfectly the gap between what could be and what will be if the current development strategy continues unabated. I appreciate your hard work and honest reporting.
Thank you- I keep plugging. And based on the crowds at City Hall, the constant attacks on our stories from a wide variety of status quo voices, and the readership, I think we are on to something. If nothing else, the idea is to get people to engage and get involved. And that has happened for the first time in many decades in Hillsboro in the past 2 years.