Who says tech firms must downsize offices in San Francisco? Certainly not SAP, Europe’s biggest tech company.
The German enterprise software giant just opened a larger office at 135 Townsend Street in South of Market, big enough for 500 people, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The 30,000-square-foot office is a blip compared with the millions of square feet that have been vacated and listed for sublease across a city where one out of three offices sits empty. The city’s office vacancy rate just hit a record 32.7 percent, according to Savills.
Bucking a work-at-home trend that has left San Francisco barren of the commuters that flooded in before the pandemic, SAP employees want to go to work, its executives say.
“We have amazing talent there that’s very eager to come to the office,” Yaad Oren, managing director of SAP Labs U.S. and head of SAP Innovation Center Network, told the Chronicle.
Like most tech giants, SAP has cut its workforce after announcing 3,000 layoffs – or 3 percent of its employees – in January. At the same time, it aims to hire 1,000 workers in growth areas.
Reuters reported last week the company is working with San Francisco-based OpenAI, creator of chatbot ChatGPT. SAP fused ChatGPT into its technology to develop more than 50 artificial intelligence case studies.
“AI is one of the strategic pillars of SAP, one of our growth engines,” Oren told the newspaper.
The firm’s new offices at the five-story building at 135 Townsend Street, built in 2013, are owned by Field Storage, a limited liability company based in Walnut Creek, according to the Chronicle’s property search tracker. Terms of SAP’s lease were not disclosed.
The office has a rooftop deck, with views of the Giants ballpark, collaboration niches and a library with study areas for employees.
SAP has 3,500 workers in the Bay Area, with large offices in San Ramon and Palo Alto. It’s one of the few local companies to expand or maintain its offices during the era of remote work.
This year, San Jose-based Cisco renewed a 247,000-square-foot lease at 500 Terry A. Francois Boulevard in Mission Bay, the biggest San Francisco lease deal of the year. The deal with the Mountain View-based The Sobrato Organization took 7.5 more years at the site.
But major San Francisco employers such as Salesforce and Meta Platforms, parent of Facebook and Instagram, have scaled back their office footprint through subleases.
— Dana Bartholomew
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