Samsung Cuts Hundreds of US Jobs, Moves Headquarters to Texas

Samsung Electronics has cut hundreds of jobs across its US consumer electronics business, and the headquarters campus it is leaving opened with a ribbon cutting only eight months ago. The company has confirmed that 739 roles at its Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, office are affected, plus roughly 100 more at its Plano, Texas, site, as it shifts its American base to Texas by the end of the year.

This is Samsung’s second US headquarters move in under a year. Both moves point toward the same Texas chip factories now carrying the company’s profits, while its mobile, display and appliance divisions absorb rising costs and the layoffs that come with them.

A Homecoming That Lasted Eight Months

Samsung had called New Jersey home for roughly 40 years, most recently from a Ridgefield Park campus it occupied for more than three decades. In 2024, the company announced plans to leave that building for a newly renovated one in Englewood Cliffs, a 325,000-square-foot property at 700 Sylvan Avenue that Unilever had just vacated for Hoboken.

Landing the lease took real effort from the borough. Councilman Tim Koutroubas said Englewood Cliffs, under Mayor Mark Park, had “outpaced Jersey City, Hoboken and other competitors,” with permits approved in under a week to match Samsung’s move in schedule. The town even added a bus stop for Samsung’s employees.

Samsung opened the campus on September 22, 2025, with a ceremony attended by Acting Governor Tahesha Way, US Senator Andy Kim and two members of Congress. President and CEO Yoonie Joung told the crowd, “It is the people and places where we do business that make our success possible,” and said the company had been proud to call New Jersey home for four decades. Plans at the time included turning open space on the campus into an events venue after Samsung closed its flagship Experience Center in New York.

Eight months later, Samsung told employees it was leaving again. Workers were notified on May 29, 2026, and the company confirmed on June 1 that its headquarters would move to its existing Legacy Central campus in Plano, a 216,000-square-foot building Samsung opened for its North Texas teams back in 2018. No new construction is involved this time. Samsung is simply moving its corporate leadership into space it already owns.

1. 2024: Samsung announces plans to leave its longtime Ridgefield Park campus for a renovated building in Englewood Cliffs.
2. September 22, 2025: Samsung holds a grand opening for its new Englewood Cliffs headquarters.
3. May 29, 2026: Employees are told the company is relocating its US headquarters again, this time to Texas.
4. June 1, 2026: Samsung confirms the move to Plano in an official statement, targeting a year end completion.
5. June 30, 2026: Employees receive formal notice of an enterprise wide reduction in force tied to the relocation.

Employees at Englewood Cliffs had until mid June to signal whether they would follow the company to Texas. A smaller group is staying behind to handle local operations that remain in New Jersey.

The Reduction in Force, by the Numbers

Reuters reported that 739 roles at Englewood Cliffs have been affected by the relocation. Most of those employees have been offered relocation packages to Plano. Others have already been laid off, though Samsung has not said how the group splits.

At the Plano office itself, about 100 employees, including workers in Samsung’s mobile division, have also lost their jobs, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters. Plano is losing jobs too, even as it inherits the corporate title.

Documents reviewed by Reuters showed employees were told on June 30 about an “enterprise wide reduction in force” that would bring a “significant number of impacts.” Reuters also found LinkedIn posts from more than 30 employees describing layoffs or departures, details the company had not previously disclosed.

Samsung employed 11,770 people in the United States at the end of 2025, a figure that includes its semiconductor workforce. The company says there is no broad global restructuring underway in its consumer products business.

• Confirmed: 739 roles are affected at Englewood Cliffs and about 100 more at Plano.
• Confirmed: the relocation to Plano must be complete by the end of 2026.
• Confirmed: Samsung received no state incentives for its Englewood Cliffs lease, according to New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority.

• Unconfirmed: how the 739 affected roles split between layoffs and relocations.
• Unconfirmed: what becomes of the Englewood Cliffs building once Samsung vacates it.
• Unconfirmed: whether further cuts are coming to Samsung’s appliance and home entertainment units.

Some of those unresolved questions matter more to Trenton and Plano than to Samsung’s balance sheet, which is why local officials, not the company, have driven most of the public accounting so far.

Why Does Texas Keep Winning Samsung’s Bets?

Samsung has poured more than $35 billion into Texas semiconductor plants since 1996, anchored by an Austin fab and a newer facility in Taylor that received a $6.4 billion CHIPS Act award. Texas charges no corporate income tax, while New Jersey’s rate sits at 11.5%, the highest in the country. Samsung said the headquarters move would “sharpen our focus on the areas that will drive the greatest impact for our customers, partners, and business.”

The Taylor facility, built to produce logic chips for 5G, AI and high performance computing, moved into equipment installation and commissioning this year. Governor Greg Abbott announced the original investment in 2021, promising more than 2,000 high tech jobs and thousands of additional indirect positions.

Texas has also spent years courting chipmakers directly. Its Semiconductor Innovation Fund, created in 2023, has appropriated roughly $948 million for grants to companies expanding manufacturing in the state. Samsung Austin Semiconductor received a $250 million award from that fund in 2025 for the Taylor project alone.

Samsung describes the calculation in operational terms. State officials on both sides of the move have described it in political ones.

New Jersey Wrote No Incentive Check

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority said on June 3 that Samsung had not received any state incentives for the Englewood Cliffs project. “Incentives never are leading site selection factors,” said John Boyd Jr., founder of the Princeton based corporate relocation firm The Boyd Company Inc.

What Englewood Cliffs did offer was a local value improvement ordinance, granting tax abatements for cosmetic and internal upgrades to the building Samsung leased from Unilever. The borough’s tax collector said Samsung paid the city $720,338 in corporate taxes this year. LG Electronics, Samsung’s rival, remains the largest corporate taxpayer in town.

New Jersey cannot continue to swim upstream with new tax hikes, especially when a key Northeast competitor state like Pennsylvania is cutting taxes.

Boyd said that, calling the timing of the announcement, early in Governor Sherrill’s term, “a five-alarm fire wake-up call.” Pennsylvania is phasing its corporate net income tax down from 9.99% in 2022 to a scheduled 4.99% by 2031, giving companies a cheaper option closer than Texas.

New Jersey’s Shrinking Fortune 500 List

Samsung’s exit lands inside a longer trend. New Jersey hosted 22 Fortune 500 headquarters in 2018. That number has fallen to 15, according to Michele Siekerka, president and CEO of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association.

State Assemblyman John Azzariti, a Republican representing the 39th District, blamed the state’s business climate directly, pointing to Texas’s approach as the more attractive one for corporate leadership. New Jersey’s Republican Assembly caucus needled Governor Sherrill’s administration over the exit within days of the announcement, posting criticism on social media.

Samsung now joins a run of high profile companies that have left New Jersey in recent years, including:

• ExxonMobil, which shifted its legal domicile from New Jersey to Texas earlier this year after nearly 150 years in the state.
• Honeywell, cited by Boyd as one of several marquee names to relocate out of New Jersey.
• Mercedes-Benz, also named by Boyd among the state’s recent corporate departures.

Meanwhile, Plano has absorbed a wave of arrivals. AT&T, KFC, Sally Beauty Holdings and Tech Mahindra have all moved headquarters functions to the Dallas suburb within the past 18 months, and AT&T’s future campus there is expected to span two million square feet.

Central Texas, meanwhile, points to its own numbers. Samsung’s Austin and Taylor campuses supported 38,498 jobs and $19.8 billion in regional economic impact in 2024, according to the company’s own economic impact report. Trenton has no equivalent figure to counter it with.

Samsung’s Consumer Electronics Arm Feels the Squeeze

Some Samsung employees worry the layoffs are only the first round. Reuters reported that workers fear further consolidation of the company’s appliance, home entertainment and mobile divisions as Samsung concentrates more of its resources on chips.

Samsung disputes that reading. The company says there is no broad global restructuring underway in its consumer products business, even as it acknowledges the relocation “may lead to changes in our workforce structure, such as employees who are unable to relocate, or certain functions that are optimized to ensure our roles align to key business priorities.”

The pressure on that side of the business shows up elsewhere too. Samsung’s television unit has kept its shipment lead, but rival TCL has been closing the growth gap faster, squeezing margins in a category Samsung has led for close to two decades. The company is still betting on new consumer hardware abroad, including a recently launched speaker lineup aimed at India’s audio market, even as its US headcount shrinks.

Back in Englewood Cliffs, Mayor Mark Park said the borough’s fundamentals have not changed, even if its newest anchor tenant is already packing up. “We are confident that the strengths that attracted Samsung to Englewood Cliffs remain as strong as ever today,” Park said.

Samsung has not announced what will become of the Sylvan Avenue building once it leaves. The moving trucks are due in Plano by the end of December.