OpenAI Prepares to Plant Flag in New Silicon Valley Offices

OpenAI is looking to grow beyond San Francisco.

The ChatGPT maker is looking to add up to 500,000 square feet of offices to its global portfolio, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The company has been purportedly touring offices in Mountain View, but hasn’t yet settled on a place to call home.

OpenAI has grown its campus in San Francisco’s Mission Bay quite a bit in recent years. In 2023, the Sam Altman-led firm subleased nearly half a million square feet of offices from Uber at 1455 and 1515 3rd Street in Mission Bay. The following year, OpenAI grabbed all 315,000 square feet of space next door at 550 Terry A. Francois Boulevard.

In planting a flag in Silicon Valley, the company would be closer to top engineering talent, allowing it to grow its head count. In March, company executives committed to doubling its current San Francisco-based workforce of 2,000 people.

“We’re always exploring how to grow our presence in a way that works best for our people and our mission,” an OpenAI spokesperson told the Business Times of the Silicon Valley office search.

While artificial intelligence companies have been growing in San Francisco in recent years, more have been expanding in Silicon Valley. Companies like Databricks, OpenAI, Anthropic and Scale AI have ramped up their search for employees in Santa Clara County, with the county’s share of AI job postings in the region jumping to 8.3 percent from 3.4 percent over the past three years, per Lightcast data cited by the Business Times. San Francisco retains the lion’s share, but that’s fallen from 96 percent to 91 percent over the same period.

The trend has seen the office markets in various cities and submarkets around the Bay Area humming back to life as tenant demand reaches its highest level in more than three years. Of those searching for new offices, more than half of demand is from tech and AI companies.

Elon Musk’s xAI, for example, just expanded in Palo Alto near Tesla’s engineering hub and is looking to grow more in the Silicon Valley city. AI startup Databricks similarly grabbed 305,000 square feet of offices in Sunnyvale earlier this year while expanding its San Francisco headquarters.

— Chris Malone Méndez