Meta to Shutter 3 Office Buildings in Fremont

After a year of office growth across the Bay Area, Meta has announced it would shutter nearly 200,000 square feet in Fremont.

The Menlo Park-based parent of Facebook will close a fifth of its Dumbarton campus in Fremont by clearing out its desks at 6591 Dumbarton Circle, 6520 and 6504 Kaiser Drive, where it occupied the entire office buildings, the San Francisco Standard reported. It will also close two worker cafes.

Meta real estate managers called it “an opportunity to optimize our space usage.” The date of the pending closures was not disclosed.

Workers from Dumbarton and 6520 Kaiser will be moved to the Menlo Park headquarters. Employees at 6504 Kaiser will bring their calculators to other buildings across the 1-million-square foot Fremont campus. The owner of the buildings was not identified.

The social media platform will lock the doors at its music room, in addition to the “Meadows” and “Sweets Over the Bridge” cafes. Its “Helpdesk and Ship Happens” offices will be moved to unknown locations.

The contraction comes more than a dozen years after a leasing spree by a company then known as Facebook. After its first public offering in 2012, Facebook ran out of room at its Menlo Park hub.

A subsequent real estate binge led to Fremont, where in 2017 it launched an office park by leasing two buildings from The Sobrato Organization before signing 14 more from Peery Arrillaga the next year. It’s not clear if the buildings being vacated are owned by Arrillaga.

Elsewhere across the Bay Area, Facebook leased two new skyscrapers in San Francisco and 1 million square feet at a new office campus in Sunnyvale.

The social media giant then inked long-term leases at another Sunnyvale campus once occupied by NetApp and 773,000 square feet of offices at the new Menlo Gateway near its original headquarters.

Then, in conjunction with widespread layoffs, Meta realized it had gobbled more offices than it could chew, according to the Standard. Two years ago, the firm signaled it planned to exit 3 million square feet of unoccupied offices.

In Fremont, it subleased a 52,400-square-foot building to a pharmaceutical company, according to CoStar.

After the pandemic lockdowns, the firm left a San Francisco tower at 181 Fremont Street vacant. Two years ago, it subleased the former NetApp campus to Walmart. Late last year, it subleased the Menlo Gateway campus to Snowflake.

Then Meta Platforms made an odd reversal. The company, which in its latest annual report said it aimed to shed 2 million square feet of offices across the Bay Area, grew its footprint instead.

At the end of last year, Meta occupied more offices than it did a year earlier, growing to 9 million square feet from 7 million square feet, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing a regulatory filing.

The company said in its most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing it increased its employee headcount by 10 percent last year, suggesting the rise in occupancy could be tied to its growing workforce.

— Dana Bartholomew