Intelligent Epitaxy Technology, Inc., or IntelliEPI, will relocate its headquarters from Richardson to Allen.

The company will build its new 68,000-square-foot facility on a tract of land on Ridgemont Drive, west of the EpiTek Solutions facility. The project is expected to be complete within the next two years.

The firm will consolidate more than 50 employees from its headquarters and its other offices in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The company’s leadership team and city officials broke ground on the land Thursday.

“[This company] will be a great fit for the whole city of Allen and for the whole community itself,” Allen Mayor Stephen Terrell said.

IntelliEPI President and CEO Yung Chung Kao said he is happy to have a new home in Allen.

IntelliEPI was first established in 1999 in Richardson and it supplies semiconducting epi-wafers for electronic industries.

"We make a product that we are very proud of, and our operations have spread out. So now we need a home where we can consolidate and work more efficiently,” Kao said. “We really need to build this land for our people because our people are the most important asset of our company.”

Dan Bowman, executive director of Allen Economic Development Corp., said the process to bring IntelliEPI to Allen began three years ago.

“Anytime you go through the process of acquiring a site and design a facility especially of this scope, it takes time,” Bowman said. “There’s not a lot of sites in the city of Allen that would accommodate a facility of this size, so this is really the perfect spot.”

Ridgemont Drive, where the facility will be built, is one of the only connectors between US 75 and Greenville Avenue that needs to be fully extended. Normally that would be a responsibility of a developer of the company, but Bowman said the city and the EDC would step in and help with the construction to improve the roadway.

GSO Architects designed the facility and Rogers-O’Brien Construction Company will build the new headquarters.