Semiconductor History | 八重洲二丁目, 東京 — A Company Named Hope, on the Third Floor

The venture was registered on 20 December 1999 as エヌイーシー日立メモリ, and it existed because Japan was losing.

NEC and 日立製作所 had spent the 1980s among the makers who between them took roughly four-fifths of the world DRAM market. By the end of the 1990s neither could afford to carry a memory business alone.

So they put both into a single 50-50 venture holding about 14 percent of the market, and started operations the following April.

Later in 2000 it took a trade name: Elpida, from ελπίδα, the Greek word for hope.

The head office was on the third floor of the 住友生命八重洲ビル at 八重洲二丁目2番1号, a 1966 block a minute's walk from Tokyo Station's Yaesu exit.

Count what came through that address afterwards.

Mitsubishi Electric's DRAM business arrived in 2003. A production subsidiary, 広島エルピーダメモリ, was set up the same year around the fab NEC had opened at 東広島.

The shares listed in Tokyo in 2004 and took a secondary listing in Taipei in 2011.

By then three Japanese DRAM businesses had been folded into one company, that company was the only maker of DRAM left in Japan, and it stood third in the world.

It also had one serious fab, at 広島, and its main overseas capacity was a joint venture in Taiwan. Consolidation had concentrated the risk as much as the capability.

Nothing of the 1966 building survives. It came down in the 八重洲二丁目北地区 redevelopment, and 東京ミッドタウン八重洲 opened on the block on 10 March 2023: forty-five storeys, 238 metres, a bus terminal underneath.

住友生命, a landowner in the scheme, keeps its Tokyo head office in the new tower, at the same address Elpida used.

The address outlived both the building and the company.

The photograph shows 東京ミッドタウン八重洲 from the Yaesu side of Tokyo Station in November 2022, two months after the tower was completed.

Photo: しっかかもっかか, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons