Jobs at Cupertino Council

CUPERTINO, CA-When CEO Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. showed up at a meeting of Cupertino City Council recently to talk about the tech company's plans for a new 150-acre headquarters here, Apple joined a growing list of technology and Internet companies that have announced plans for new offices totaling in the millions of square feet. Besides the more than three million square feet that Apple would add to the mix with its new headquarters, other tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have either occupied huge new office complexes or unveiled plans for office campuses in the West and Northwest.

In some cases the companies are moving out of their old offices and into new space. In other cases, they're keeping the old offices and expanding into the new ones. Either way, the tech firms stand out in a US office market that remains sluggish despite some improvement in the past year. Tech firms, in short, represent one of the few growth areas in the office sector.

New Apple Headquarters Rendering

For example, Google recently unveiled plans to develop office space in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, where it has signed a deal to lease 9.4 acres of land from the city for $30 million. According to the city, work could start in 2012 on the 600,000-square-foot Google campus, which would be designed by the German firm Ingenhoven Architects.

Also in the Silicon Valley, Yahoo, as reported on GlobeSt.com, has won approval from the Santa Clara City Council for the construction of a three-million-square-foot campus here. City Council members certified the environmental impact report, and have approved the proposed development of 13 structures to be built on 48 acres between Old Ironsides Drive and Patrick Henry Drive for the Sunnyvale-based technology company.

In Menlo Park, Social networking site Facebook is planning to redevelop old Sun Microsystems site, as reported on GlobeSt.com, and two nearby parcels in Menlo Park to house 9,400 employees. The Sun campus and the adjacent buildings on Constitution Drive will reach their full capacity by 2017. Besides purchasing the 57-acre Sun campus situated east of Bayfront Expressway, Facebook has bought a 22-acre site at 312 and 314 Constitution Dr.

In an as yet unconfirmed move, Twitter is rumored to be considering a big space in a building owned by a Shorenstein-managed fund in San Francisco. And, farther up the coast in Seattle, Vulcan Real Estate recently completed the 545,000-square-foot fourth phase of the 1.7-million-square-foot Amazon.com headquarters in the South Lake Union district, a phase that includes 25,000 square feet of street-level retail space in addition to the new class A office space. A total of 10 buildings in the first four phases are now finished, and the final office building is set to open in 2013. The entire headquarters consists of nine new buildings and two historic renovations.

Apple's new headquarters, as outlined by Jobs at the Cupertino City Council meeting, would house the approximately 12,000 workers that the company has in various locations in Cupertino, and eventually as many as 13,000 employees. The company would retain ownership of its existing headquarters, which houses about 2,600 workers; the remainder of its Cupertino employees work in various rented buildings.

Construction could begin next year on the new headquarters, which would be slated to open in 2015.The new headquarters would include a main building, a parking structure, an energy center to power the facility, an auditorium, a fitness center and an R&D facility. Some 80% of the site would be landscaping. (including 6,000 trees vs. 3,700 now) compared to 20% currently, and surface parking would shrink by 90%.