Ohio requires WARN notices — Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice letters — when companies lay off more than 50 employees at a single work site within 30 days.
“We are doing some layoffs to reduce costs,” Riegel said in an emailed response to questions from the Dayton Daily News. “The continued challenges with tariffs and the global memory spike/supply chain availability difficulties are certainly headwinds.”
Asked about the state of contractual relationships with customers, Riegel added: “We don’t discuss specific customer contracts due to confidentiality.”
The reference to a “global memory spike” is a nod to the cost of random access memory, or RAM, which can be found in a multitude of technologies consumers use.
But artificial intelligence companies like Anthropic, Google and others also use RAM to drive their servers in huge data centers.
This growing demand across sectors is driving up prices for memory.
“The global smartphone market is poised to suffer its biggest decline ever in 2026, sinking to a more than decade low in shipments, as surging memory chip prices drive up device costs,” Reuters news service reported last month.
Last year, Riegel said his company achieved in the neighborhood of $1 billion in annual revenue globally.
Riegel is more than a local chief executive. In recent years, Stratacache’s real estate arm, Arkham, has been busy, acquiring a downtown building at 33 E. Second St. for $500,000. It’s one of several buildings the company owns in downtown Dayton.
Riegel has been a busy downtown investor since 2019, buying the former Kettering Tower at Second and Main streets (now his company’s namesake tower).
He also purchased for $5.5 million the former Premier Health downtown headquarters at 110 N. Main, across from Stratacache Tower, in late 2023.
Also that year, Riegel’s company negotiated a leaseholder sale for the KeyBank tower, across Main Street from the former Kettering Tower.
A spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, the state department to which companies send WARN notices, said Monday his office has not received a WARN letter from Stratacache.
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