Above: 188 The Embarcadero in San Francisco.
Technology giant Google is once again snapping up more real estate for its employees.
The company has inked a deal to purchase 188 The Embarcadero, a eight-floor building with views of the San Francisco Bay, and has leased space at the 1 Market St. building two blocks away, according to a report last night from the San Jose Mercury News.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed the deal in an email to VentureBeat.
The expansions will considerably extend Google’s reach in the neighborhood. Google’s three-floor presence at 345 Spear St., a short walk from both of the new sites, has been open since 2007. Products such as the Google App Engine platform as a service have come out of Google San Francisco, and going forward, much more could result from Googlers in Fog City.
That’s especially true given that so much startup and venture capital activity happens in San Francisco, and top engineers could well prefer to be closer to the action here rather than at headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Google was looking to expand near the intersection of 16th and Alabama streets in San Francisco’s Mission district, according to reports in February. One blog, SocketSite, said that no deal was on. Controversy over gentrification has arisen in the Mission as tech workers have migrated into the neighborhood. A Google expansion in San Francisco, where the company has operated for years, could create less of a spectacle.
The status of Google’s real estate dealings in the Mission are unclear. Google did not provide clear information on that subject.
"We are excited to expand in San Francisco, and we will continue to work hard to be a good neighbor in the communities where we work and live,” the spokeswoman told VentureBeat.
Meanwhile, Google has been adding office space in London and other cities around the world. Google has also started and paused work on a new Bay View campus not far from headquarters.
Google has also been growing its real estate footprint through the construction of more data centers to run its popular web services and, increasingly, its public cloud.
Google employs nearly 50,000 Google people.
Use a free or cheap marketing automation system? Tell us what's great about it (and not so great), and we'll share survey data from everyone else with you.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »
