Apple Working to Lease 700,000-800,000 Square Feet of New Office Space in Sunnyvale

[MacRumors]

While Apple moves forward on plans for its new 2.8 million square foot corporate campus in Cupertino, the company continues to grow with the success of its products. Apple's interim space needs led the company to lease 373,000 square feet in Cupertino six months ago, and soon after expand its New York City presence to over 50,000 square feet.

The San Jose Mercury News now reports that Apple is working on deals to lease between 700,000 and 800,000 square feet of additional space in Sunnyvale, California, adjacent to the company's hometown of Cupertino.

According to the report, Apple has already signed a lease for a four-building complex in Sunnyvale totaling 215,000 square feet. The company is said to be preparing move into the new facility, which is approximately seven miles from Apple's main corporate campus, by the end of this quarter.

The company has also signed a lease for over 100,000 square feet in another two-building complex. Estimates suggest that Apple could house about 1,300 employees over the two sites, but could push that Sunnyvale population to over 3,000 if it can track down the additional space it is looking for.

"Apple seems to be gobbling up everything they can," said Chad Leiker, a vice president with Kidder Mathews, a realty firm. "They are taking a ton of space."

Apple has long been overflowing its main Cupertino campus, purchasing and leasing additional space surrounding the campus and elsewhere. The company's plans for its new major campus are intended to allow it to consolidate many of those space needs currently served by leased space into a single company-owned location. But with construction on the new campus yet to get underway, Apple will need to continue leasing new space over the next several years in order to handle its rapidly expanding workforce.

Article Link: Apple Working to Lease 700,000-800,000 Square Feet of New Office Space in Sunnyvale

 

[Joe-Diver]

That's a big space, it should be interesting. Where do they plan to build the spaceship building?

 

[Shrink]

50,000 square fee in New York City. That's a hell of an investment. I can't even imagine the pre square foot cost.

...it's good to be the king...

 

[Exponent]

Interesting - they're going in 4 buildings across from Fry's (on the Santa Clara side of town), and two over in the opposite end of Sunnyvale by the golf course next to Mountain View.

Meanwhile, downtown Sunnyvale remains a torn-up post-apocalyptic unfinished mess! I'm amazed (yet not) that whomever is running (?) the downtown redevelopment project didn't try to lure them in. If they didn't, they deserve to be fired!

 

[ThunderSkunk]

They'll be in good company!

 

[musikia]

The "Spaceship"

Full info, including site maps, here: http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1107

It will be between Tantau and Wolfe, on the south side of Homestead.

 

[nadador]

Just imagine how much empty office space there's gonna be when Apple moves OUT of all these spaces and into their new HQ. That's gonna hurt.

 

[applesith]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Just imagine how much empty office space there's gonna be when Apple moves OUT of all these spaces and into their new HQ. That's gonna hurt.

Another company or companies will take the space. No big deal.

 

[ProVideo]

Seems like Apple has been on a spending spree in the past few months. Hopefully these turn out to be wise investments for the long run. Somewhat worrying that all this cash is being spent once Jobs is gone though. If Apple blows through half of their cash reserves in a few years, I'm going to start questioning Tim Cook and the Apple board.

 

[pixelpro]

Just imagine how much empty office space there's gonna be when Apple moves OUT of all these spaces and into their new HQ. That's gonna hurt.

By the time the spaceship is built, Apple's employee count would have far exceeded the capacity. It won't be emptying those buildings anytime soon.

 

[mex4eric]

Seems like Apple has been on a spending spree in the past few months. Hopefully these turn out to be wise investments for the long run. Somewhat worrying that all this cash is being spent once Jobs is gone though. If Apple blows through half of their cash reserves in a few years, I'm going to start questioning Tim Cook and the Apple board.

Sounds like much better expenditures than the typical share buy back and dividends that investor advisors want!

 

[Spencie]

Sunnyvale?!?! Like Exponent said, its a pretty un-Apple like place for their new buildings. Oh how I hate that ugly Fry's with the stairs and stuff.

 

[FakeWozniak]

"They are taking a ton of space."

I think the proper terminology would be "metric ass-ton".

 

[SandynJosh]

Seems like Apple has been on a spending spree in the past few months. Hopefully these turn out to be wise investments for the long run. Somewhat worrying that all this cash is being spent once Jobs is gone though. If Apple blows through half of their cash reserves in a few years, I'm going to start questioning Tim Cook and the Apple board.

Santa has to find a place for all his elves. If I remember Jobs' statements when presenting the mothership plans to the city council, Apple will STILL need office space in addition to the new building.

In addition, Apple never has tried to swallow a big frog while acquiring new companies. Money spent usually has a rapid ROI, and even when buying up that huge patent portfolio a couple years back, Apple took along a couple other investors to split the costs.

This, in comparison to HP and Google who shook their piggy banks pretty hard to buy up Palm and Motorola Mobile.

 

[Exponent]

Sunnyvale?!?! Like Exponent said, its a pretty un-Apple like place for their new buildings. Oh how I hate that ugly Fry's with the stairs and stuff.

Huh? Sunnyvale is a fine place for Apple, considering it's right next to Cupertino... ...and besides, more of the store signs are in a language most Apple employees would understand!

Also, I'm not following about the Sunnyvale Frys: It's all on one level, without a single staircase in sight, and is actually designed like an elegant(-ish) museum. I really think you have Sunnyvale confused with Campbell (home of the "Aztek pyramid Frys").

 

[unlimitedx]

Huh? Sunnyvale is a fine place for Apple, considering it's right next to Cupertino... ...and besides, more of the store signs are in a language most Apple employees would understand!

Also, I'm not following about the Sunnyvale Frys: It's all on one level, without a single staircase in sight, and is actually designed like an elegant(-ish) museum. I really think you have Sunnyvale confused with Campbell (home of the "Aztek pyramid Frys").

Pyramid Frys is in San Jose too

 

[cvaldes]

Sunnyvale?!?! Like Exponent said, its a pretty un-Apple like place for their new buildings. Oh how I hate that ugly Fry's with the stairs and stuff.

Apple will probably shunt certain groups to the Sunnyvale campus and keep core engineering in Cupertino.

Most of the admin groups (Finance, Legal, Facilities, Security) will probably get exiled to Sunnyvale as well as groups like Apple Retail (corporate), maybe Customer Support (corporate), corporate IS, some of the marketing groups.

The Siri development team might be a candidate to move to Sunnyvale. The company was headquartered in San Jose before Apple's acquisition. This appears to be a fast-growing group, so relocating to a space that has some growing room would seem desirable.

I hate Fry's too.

 

[AidenShaw]

Apple will probably shunt certain groups to the Sunnyvale campus and keep core engineering in Cupertino.

Most of the admin groups (Finance, Legal, Facilities, Security) will probably get exiled to Sunnyvale as well as groups like Apple Retail (corporate), maybe Customer Support (corporate), corporate IS, some of the marketing groups.

From what I've seen, quite the opposite migration would occur.

Finance and Legal (and Marketing) are intimately tied to the C-level execs, so they'd stay where the execs are.

Facilities and Security are on every campus, they can't be put in one place - and the Facilities and Security execs would probably stay with the other execs.

Engineering can be put anywhere, and will be. Same with Support and IT, although the exec staff would probably stay with the other execs. Engineering execs would stay at HQ (although probably have offices both at HQ and SVL).

ps: IMO the spaceship will not happen as proposed, it was a wasteful Steve Jobs ego trip that won't stand up to scrutiny going forward.

 

[Spencie]

My fail. My bad.

 

[cvaldes]

From what I've seen, quite the opposite migration would occur.

Finance and Legal (and Marketing) are intimately tied to the C-level execs, so they'd stay where the execs are.

Facilities and Security are on every campus, they can't be put in one place - and the Facilities and Security execs would probably stay with the other execs.

Engineering can be put anywhere, and will be. Same with Support and IT, although the exec staff would probably stay with the other execs. Engineering execs would stay at HQ (although probably have offices both at HQ and SVL).

ps: IMO the spaceship will not happen as proposed, it was a wasteful Steve Jobs ego trip that won't stand up to scrutiny going forward.

I've been out of the high tech business for a while, but my opinion stands.

Apple is an engineering-driven company. They will prioritize those employees. The nice lady who processes your paycheck or expense report does not need to be in Cupertino.

Corporate IS would not need to be on the Infinite Loop campus. The only IS staffers that are tied to locations would be divisional/group IS. Facilities? You don't need to be at 1 Infinite Loop to run some CAD program to design cubicle spaces or organize moves.

Apple probably has 200-300 Vice Presidents. If you're not at the Senior Vice President level (or a tacit equivalent), you're probably not really a candidate to have a cubicle at 1 Infinite Loop near Tim's. You are going to drive to meetings.

I doubt if the spaceship campus will be built as the submitted design. That said, something else will be built in its place and will probably house a similar number of employees. It might just be a cluster of buildings of a considerably tamer design.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Apple will probably shunt certain groups to the Sunnyvale campus and keep core engineering in Cupertino.

Most of the admin groups (Finance, Legal, Facilities, Security) will probably get exiled to Sunnyvale as well as groups like Apple Retail (corporate), maybe Customer Support (corporate), corporate IS, some of the marketing groups.

The Siri development team might be a candidate to move to Sunnyvale. The company was headquartered in San Jose before Apple's acquisition. This appears to be a fast-growing group, so relocating to a space that has some growing room would seem desirable.

I hate Fry's too.

Accounting is in Austin, Texas.

 

[cvaldes]

Well, there you have it, thank you for justifying my basic point. I've never worked at Apple so I don't know where each group actually resides. I just listed Finance as the type of group that would be stationed at a location that was not at the HQ.

 

[AidenShaw]

I doubt if the spaceship campus will be built as the submitted design. That said, something else will be built in its place and will probably house a similar number of employees. It might just be a cluster of buildings of a considerably tamer design.

I expect that it will have far more employees, and do far less damage to the surrounding neighbourhoods. I also expect that it will allow for planned growth within the campus.

Silicon Valley is a narrow strip of land between the bay and the mountains. (Or between the mountains and the mountains, depending on where you're looking - and Cupertino is south of the bay so it's mountains to mountains.) You live in Mountain View, so you know this.

The spaceship campus is simply irresponsible - building a low-rise office building surrounded by newly-planted orchards with no regard to traffic. They should build high-rise buildings and plan for future growth on the same campus - AND THEY SHOULD PAY TO ROUTE LIGHT RAIL PUBLIC TRANSIT TO THE CAMPUS.

 

[cvaldes]

I live on the SF Peninsula so yes, I am familiar with these issues.

Where the ******* is the county going to find the resources to fund a regularly-operating light rail extension that services Cupertino? It would be a dead-end spur that goes nowhere else. Apple shouldn't be required to shoulder the bulk of the financial resources in providing public transportation.

On top of that, I don't know if there's a railroad right-of-way available for purchase at a reasonable price. There's an old spur in the western Santa Clara Valley; Southern Pacific routinely moves a few cars back and forth, only to say that they still have activity on the tracks, even if the trains go nowhere.

The spaceship campus needs some additional attention, but being adjacent to I-280 is actually far more reasonable than putting smaller facilities farther away from freeway exits. Note that the spaceship campus proposal also included a dedicated freeway exit, something that is possible on I-280 and not US-101 nor CA-85, so to claim that Apple hasn't included such issues in their plans is facetious.

There are also aesthetic issues with low-rise and high-rise buildings, as well as certain safety concerns of a high-rise building in the event of a major seismic event. I will point out that the San Andreas Fault runs along nearby Stevens Creek.

The best option is for Apple to stake out the land and erect structures that will support the projected staffing increases (note that Apple grows staff quite slowly).

For light rail to be feasible, there really needs to be a much larger concentration of activity, something Cupertino doesn't have.

VTA Light Rail is still sparsely used. Caltrain -- as a joint powers board is in a pickle since it doesn't have a secure funding source, even if it is the oldest public transit corridor in the nation. BART -- after nearly four decades of operation still doesn't connect to the second most populous city in California.

As someone who works at a location where there is no mass transit (Santa Cruz Mountains), I am highly aware of the lack of public transit, its convenience and its overall value. I really wish I could doze off on a train to get to my place of employment (I did this in the mid-Nineties).

Sadly, it will never happen unless I change companies (and I like where I work, so it's not gonna happen in the near term).

Lastly, I will point out that despite long-time regular service from Caltrain, downtown Sunnyvale's arrested development is an unmitigated disaster for anyone except tiny startups looking for a bargain in office space (that they can't get in Mountain View or Palo Alto).

 

[drummingcraig]

Sunnyvale huh? I wonder if they're moving into the offices that used to be occupied by Protovision?