May 4

May 4 IBM selling off large portion of Rochester real estate as part of consolidation

IBM announced plans on Wednesday to sell off a significant chunk of its Rochester campus to an outside developer and consolidate all personnel into eight buildings on the east side of the campus.

"As part of IBM's ongoing transformation as a cognitive computing and cloud platform company, IBM in Rochester is focused on increased collaboration and innovation, creating work spaces to enable this," Tory Johnson, VP of Supply Chain Engineering for IBM in Rochester, said in a statement.

"To support these efforts, we plan to sell our excess Rochester real estate holdings to an outside developer and bring all IBMers together over the next year into eight buildings on the east side of the campus."

The moves will not involve any personnel changes other than their relocation within the site, Johnson said.

IBM has approximately 430,000 employees worldwide, including about 2,500 in Rochester (2013). The tech giant's workforce in Rochester peaked at 8,100 employees in 1991, according to an archive from the Star Tribune.

Future plans for the soon-to-be-vacated portion of the campus have not been disclosed. At the moment, IBM occupies more than 3 million square feet of owned and leased space in Rochester.

In early 2015, IBM began negotiations with the City of Rochester regarding the purchase of 160 acres of parkland on the campus. However, the company pulled the plug on the talks soon after the plans were made public.