Google Buys Meadow Point-Adjacent Offices in San Jose

Google is growing in San Jose as it makes strategic tweaks to its Silicon Valley office holdings.

The Sundar Pichai-led tech giant bought an office building at 4500 North First Street in San Jose’s Alviso neighborhood for $25.2 million, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported. The firm purchased the offices from an affiliate of Pasadena-based real estate investment and development firm Gemdale.

Google’s acquisition includes the two-story, 83,000-square-foot building built in 2018 as well as accompanying surface parking. The offices are next to nine Google-owned buildings, known as its Meadow Point campus. That new complex is slated to fill up with thousands of Google employees in the coming months, according to San Jose City Council member David Cohen.

The purchase comes as Google modifies its real estate strategy in the region.

Last month, news surfaced that the Sundar Pichai-led company is planning to move its cloud computing arm into its Caribbean office campus in Sunnyvale, consolidating its workers from other offices in the South Bay city. Google Cloud is slated to start moving into its Caribbean campus in Sunnyvale this month. The Bjarke Ingels-designed complex was built in 2017 and spans 1.5 million square feet across two buildings at 100 and 200 West Caribbean Drive.

Google Cloud will vacate a group of office buildings elsewhere in Sunnyvale owned by real estate developer Jay Paul Company in Sunnyvale’s Moffett Park neighborhood. Google leased more than 500,000 square feet of offices in Moffett Park from Jay Paul in early 2020. The firm has reportedly been looking to exit those offices since last year. Overall, Google has vacated 5.6 million square feet of offices in the Bay Area in recent years, placing about 40 percent onto the sublease market.

At the same time, Google is trimming its sublease space in Silicon Valley, reclaiming nearly 2 million square feet from the local sublease market for itself, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported. — Chris Malone Méndez