Walmart Subleases 719K sf Office Campus in Sunnyvale

Walmart has subleased a 719,000-square-foot office campus in north Sunnyvale.

Walmart.com, the digital arm for the Arkansas-based retail giant, inked a deal with Meta Platforms to sublease the Moffett Green tech campus at 1275-1395 Crossman Avenue, the San Jose Mercury News reported, citing unidentified sources.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Menlo Park-based parent of Facebook leased the four-building campus in December 2021, in the single largest private-sector office lease of the year.

Then came a pandemic shift to remote work and layoffs across Silicon Valley’s tech sector. Meta Platforms slashed 5,195 Bay Area jobs, including those in Sunnyvale.

The sublease deal would appear to represent an expansion for Walmart.com in Sunnyvale. The digital unit has maintained a presence in Sunnyvale since 2014, when it leased 107,000 square feet in an office building on the edge of Downtown.

The five-story campus, built in 2009 near the corner of Crossman Avenue and Caribbean Drive, was once the home of NetApp.

It has four office buildings, two parking garages, an executive briefing center, data center, theater, full-service cafeteria, multiple kitchens, vegetable garden, break centers and phone rooms.

It also contains a gym with a basketball court, sand volleyball court, bocce ball courts and its own putting green.

In April 2021, NetApp sold its vacant campus to New York-based Tishman Speyer for $356 million, or $495 per square foot.

In June last year, Tishman Spyer flipped the property, now leased to Meta, to Los Angeles-based CommonWealth Partners for $707 million, or $983 per square foot.

Available offices for sublease in Silicon Valley were a record 7.6 million square feet in the third quarter, yet average monthly asking rates rose to $5.22 per square foot, from $5.18 during the previous period, according to Savills.

The region’s total availability rate — the vacant offices combined with available offices for sublease — was 26.6 percent, the same as the previous quarter.

— Dana Bartholomew