Researchers who purchase machinery and equipment for use in their research can save considerable sums of money by taking advantage of the California Partial Sales Tax Rate Exemption, in place through June 30, 2022. This exemption, put in place by the California State Board of Equalization, lowers the sales tax rate by 4.2% for equipment that will be used at least 50% for research and development, for over one year. NOTE: the exemption only applies to manufacturing, research and development in biotechnology, and research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences.
Under this program for example, researchers who purchase compute nodes for the Berkeley Research Computing HPC cluster can benefit significantly. A typical purchase order, for 4 ea. 24-core Haswell compute nodes, costs $865 less under the partial sales tax rate exemption.
For more information on the partial sales tax rate exemption, please see the Supply Chain Management website.