ABB (NYSE:ABB), one of the first tenants of N.C. State’s Centennial Campus, is laying out plans to grow there.

The power technologies company plans to move roughly 350 employees in its Power Products and Power Systems unit from the company’s existing Centennial Campus space to the new Alliance One building. The company said it will lease 94,000 square feet – three of five floors – in the new Alliance One building. ABB has signed a 10-year lease for the space and expects to make the move in in 2015.

The company said that the move is due to anticipated growth in the power electronics business and is unrelated to President Obama’s announcement last week’s of a manufacturing innovation institute that involving collaboration between seven universities and 18 companies, including N.C. State and ABB. ABB said the Centennial Campus move has been planned for some time due to anticipation of future growth in the power electronics sector. ABB will keep its corporate research center on the first two floors of its current space at the 940 building. That space, including the labs, will be upgraded.

“This move into a larger building on Centennial creates a real center of power engineering innovation on campus and further highlights our commitment to innovation, creating jobs, nurturing local engineering talent and growing our North American headquarters here in North Carolina,” Greg Scheu, president and CEO of ABB Inc. and regional manager of North America said in a statement.

ABB and N.C. State kept a close relationship since the company set up offices on Centennial Campus in 1991. ABB recently donated $632,000 to N.C. State’s electrical and computer engineering department. The gift established the ABB Distinguished Professorship in Electrical Engineering, the ABB Power Engineering Scholarship program, a faculty support and development fund and a lecture series, all focused on power engineering, a field that deals with the generation, transmission and distribution of electric power, as well as the electrical devices connected to those systems.
ABB employs nearly 2,000 throughout North Carolina, including 700 in the Triangle. Other locations include Asheville, Hickory, Huntersville, Kings Mountain, Marion, and Pinetops. ABB employs 30,000 throughout North America.