Har Hotzvim - History

History

The park was founded in the early 1970s by the Jerusalem Economic Corporation, in order to facilitate the development of a high tech industry in Jerusalem. At the time the location was at the edge of the built up area area of the city, but over the years several major roads were built and accessibility to the site was improved; including: the Begin Expressway to the west of the park and Route 9 north of the park. One of the first tenants in the park was Luz Industries an early pioneer of Solar thermal energy, which in the 1980s built the world's largest solar energy generating facility SEGS in the Mojave Desert.

The first major international corporation to establish a base at Har Hotzvim was Intel, which opened its Fab 8 semiconductor manufacturing plant in 1985.

In the early 1990s, as Jerusalem was awarded the status of a preferred development zone for the high-tech industry, an expansion plan was initiated by the Jerusalem Development Authority. The expansion took place in three stage (known as Har Hotzvim stage b, c and d) and by the mid 2000s most of the available plots have been developed.

In 2005, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries opened a new, state-of-the-art pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in Har Hotzvim, at a cost of US$80 million. It initially produced about 4 billion tablets a year, rising to 8 billion a year when the second phase of building was completed.