USA
Hitachi Seeks FTZ Nod for Oklahoma Data Center Storage Plant
FTZ News: Hitachi Vantara Manufacturing’s plant in Norman, Okla., turned up in Monday’s Federal Register. The Foreign-Trade Zones Board published a notice that the company wants production authority inside FTZ 106 for enterprise datacenter disk storage hardware.
The filing landed at the Board on Sept. 16. Monday’s notice is docket B-124-2026, document 2026-19777, page 61202 of volume 91. Anyone who wants to object or comment has until Nov. 9. Juanita Chen on the Board staff is taking the mail, [email protected].
What Hitachi listed as finished goods is the kind of parts list that comes off a storage line: cooling fans and accelerator fans, front bezels, hard-disk and flash and solid-state drives, controller boards and processor blades, chassis, host adapters, service processors, cache chips, rail kits, racks. The foreign-status stuff in the summary is smaller — label ribbon, polyester labels, plastic bags, connector pieces. Duties on those inputs go from free up to 3.4 percent. If the Board later says yes, the grant would cover only what is on that list.
The Norman factory is not new. Hitachi has been there since 1987, on Imhoff Road, a few hundred thousand square feet. In July the World Economic Forum put the site on its Lighthouse roster. Company statements from that week said the plant builds systems such as VSP One for buyers in the Americas. Monday’s Register item does not open a factory and does not approve the production request. It starts the public clock.
The Board had a thicker stack last week. Eli Lilly’s Concord, N.C., drug plant, Subzone 57F, went in on the 25th; comments there close Nov. 4. Lilly also has paper in for FTZ 93 in Durham.
On the 24th the Board signed Subzone 57J for AUMOVIO Systems in Morganton, N.C., still under FTZ 57’s 2,000-acre cap, and AUMOVIO asked at the same time to make braking and suspension electronics there. Total Distribution in Mogadore, Ohio, got Subzone 40U; the approval date on the staff letter is Sept. 18. Applied Materials dropped its subzone bid for Austin and Pflugerville in FTZ 183.
Other subzone papers from that issue: Caguas Expressway Motors in Puerto Rico, JAS Forwarding in Greer, S.C., Magna Mirrors in Duncan, S.C., Perimeter Global Logistics in Grand Prairie, Tex., Schaeffler in Fort Mill, S.C. Production notices went up for Enerflex in Houston, Infinera in Allentown, Merck in Rahway, Olon in Concord, Ohio, and Piramal in Bethlehem, Pa. Most of those comment dates are Nov. 3.
Phillips 66’s Borger, Tex., grant, Subzone 165A, was reissued Sept. 22.
The trade-zone lobby group NAFTZ said Friday that a House-Senate FTZ caucus had its first formal sit-down. The Scott-Britt bill that would let some zone-made goods keep USMCA treatment into Canada and Mexico is still in Senate Finance. Lance Gooden’s House version is at Ways and Means.
Customs put out its weekly quota table the same morning as the Hitachi notice./.