GE Healthcare Life Sciences will open a 160,000-square-foot facility at 200 Forest St. in Marlborough next spring to serve as its new U.S. headquarters.

The New Jersey-based division of GE Corp. is consolidating its operations from Princeton and Piscataway, N.J., and will employ more than 500 people at the Marlborough location. Some of the New Jersey workforce will be offered jobs in Massachusetts.

GE Healthcare said the $21 million project includes the build-out of vacant space, complementing its existing manufacturing facility in Westborough. The new U.S. headquarters will house its research, bioprocessing, medical imaging, in vitro diagnostics and services segments. The $4 billion division of GE has more than 11,500 employees in more than 100 countries.

Framingham-based developer Atlantic Management has spent more than $200 million since 2011 repositioning the 10-acre former Hewlett-Packard campus near Route 495 as a mixed-use development. It gained approval from city officials to add a 153-room Hilton Garden Inn, a 350-unit AvalonBay apartment complex and 30,000 square feet of retail to the 750,000-square-foot office and lab structures built in the 1960s and 1980s.

Quest Diagnostics signed on as the first office and lab tenant last year, and started occupying its 204,000-square-foot space in early June.

Marlborough, the largest commercial real estate submarket on 495, has staged a rapid comeback from the loss of major corporate users in recent years such as Fidelity Investments. Since office vacancy rates topped out at 47 percent in 2012, Boston Scientific and TJX Cos. have relocated to office parks in the city. As of June 30, the office vacancy rate had fallen to 32 percent, according to Cassidy Turley, and Marlborough Mayor Arthur Vigeant estimates the city has recovered more than 4,000 jobs.