Foxconn Technology Group has purchased a downtown Milwaukee building to house its North American headquarters as it prepares to build a mammoth manufacturing complex 30 miles to the south.
Foxconn purchased the seven-story building from Northwestern Mutual, which ceremonially turned over the keys to the Taiwanese company Friday.
Foxconn executive Louis Woo says about 500 people will work at the headquarters. It will also house what Foxconn says is an innovation center to help startups and entrepreneurs develop applications for the display technology the company is creating.
The electronics giant is building a manufacturing plant in neighboring Racine County to make liquid crystal display panels for commercial and consumer uses, including televisions. The $10 billion plant is expected eventually employ as many as 13,000 people.
Meanwhile, Foxconn and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are launching an internship program that will send engineering students to the company’s headquarters in Taiwan for a semester.
The program announced Thursday is designed to develop local talent for the company’s planned manufacturing facility in southeast Wisconsin.
Five students from the university’s College of Engineering and Applied Science will be selected this fall to go abroad, the university said. They will spend time in Mount Pleasant before going to Taiwan in February and will work on projects at one of the company’s facilities there through June. Students will also study at the Chung Yuan Christian University during the internship program, taking classes in culture and language while working on applied research projects.
Students will get “a valuable hands-on international working experience and apply their learning in a real-world, global environment,” Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn founder and CEO Terry Gou, said in prepared remarks.
Woo said UWM’s strong engineering program, diverse student population and experience with international partnerships attracted the company.
The company will need thousands of engineers for its facility, Foxconn officials said. The internship program could be expanded to other universities and colleges in the state and the region, UWM and Foxconn officials said.
“We definitely want to grow it,” said Brett Peters, dean of the UWM College of Engineering & Applied Science. “How big and how quickly is yet to be determined.”
The Foxconn co-op program is the engineering college’s second international internship program. Rockwell Automation started an internship program with the college in 2016 in partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
