AI Data Firm Databricks Plants Flag in Sunnyvale

Artificial intelligence giant Databricks is growing its Bay Area presence with a new office in Sunnyvale.

The venture capital-funded company has leased 305,000 square feet across all seven floors at 200 Washington Avenue in downtown Sunnyvale, marking the company’s third outpost in the Bay Area and 39th around the world, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Databricks, an AI-driven data and analytics platform, will be the first office tenant at the new Cityline Sunnyvale mixed-use complex.

AI Data Firm Databricks Plants Flag in Sunnyvale — Renderings of the Cityline Sunnyvale offices (LinkedIn, Cityline Sunnyvale)

The Sunnyvale commitment is the latest instance of Databricks doubling down on the Bay Area. In February, the company inked a roughly 150,000-square-foot lease at 1 Sansome Street in San Francisco for its new global headquarters. Databricks also has a 47,000-square-foot office at 351 East Evelyn Avenue in Mountain View, which it opened in 2020.

“This investment will accelerate our pace of research and product development, deepen our collaboration with customers, and help us attract the best minds,” Reynold Xin, co-founder and chief architect at Databricks, said in a statement.

The new digs in Sunnyvale could allow the company to relocate its Mountain View employees to spread out across more space. “South Bay and San Francisco are on par, in terms of headcount, and we’re running out of space in both because the company’s growing quickly,” Xin told the Business Times.

Databricks isn’t planning to move any employees yet, though, as it plans to spend at least a year building out the interior. The Sunnyvale location will likely hold a variety of functions and largely house engineers. The company “intend[s] to use that office to host customer meetings, briefings, and all that,” Xin said.

The firm purportedly grabbed the space to be closer to its South Bay clients like Nvidia, Adobe and Intuit, per the Business Times. “We have a lot of customers headquartered in South Bay,” Xin said.

With more AI companies planting flags in the Bay Area, they’re expected to gobble up millions of square feet of office space over the next five years as the sector continues to grow.

In San Francisco alone, AI firms are predicted to expand into as much as 21 million square feet of offices by 2030 — a massive increase from the current figure of about 5 million — according to CBRE. The real estate firm believes companies could hire as many as 60,000 new employees for in-person work. — Chris Malone Méndez