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SUNNYVALE — Facebook has officially opened a huge Sunnyvale campus big enough to accommodate several thousand workers, a complex that features offices and open spaces designed to help the company entice recruits and retain existing employees.
The social networking giant has just moved into the first of three big office buildings that it will occupy in Sunnyvale. On Wednesday night, Facebook gathered with employees, city officials, business leaders, and real estate executives to stage a ribbon-cutting to mark its occupancy of the sleek and gleaming offices.
“This will be a great place to attract new talent to Facebook,” John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president of global facilities and real estate, said during the event. “We are really excited that we could locate in Sunnyvale.”
The three-building campus that Facebook has leased totals 1.05 million square feet, enough space for potentially 5,300 employees in a project called Moffett Towers 2 that was developed by veteran real estate firm Jay Paul Co.
“This campus allows us to tap into the local talent pool and to grow our talent around the Bay Area,” said Christopher Hom, Facebook’s director of real estate in the Bay Area.
Facebook’s move into Sunnyvale marks a fresh triumph for development firm Jay Paul Co. During the recession, the Jay Paul firm recognized the potential for major new office hubs in northern Sunnyvale’s Moffett Park district. The location could entice tech companies that needed a lot more elbow room and sought to be near Silicon Valley talent pools.
The Jay Paul firm’s gamble has paid off in a big way. A short distance away, in big office buildings also developed by Jay Paul, tech titans Google and Amazon have leased big chunks of office space in Sunnyvale.
“We saw Moffett Park’s potential,” Jay Paul, president of the company that bears his name, said in an interview with this news organization. “It’s great to see what is happening in Moffett Park.”
Near the tech work spaces inside the new Facebook building are amenities such as a small kitchen, snacks in big dispensers, an interfaith chapel, and a mothering room.
Outside, numerous gathering areas meander alongside the office buildings, offering places for employees who seek ways to retreat, or at least, temporarily escape the humdrum patterns of a modern workspace.
“Facebook’s mission is to connect people all over the world, and we also want employees to feel they are connected to each other,” Hom said. “All of our buildings have some common approaches, but they also all look different. We don’t use a cookie-cutter approach with our buildings.”
The Facebook lease in Sunnyvale, which was inked in March 2018, was at the time the largest rental transaction in the Bay Area. The deal was arranged through a team from commercial realty brokerage Newmark Knight Frank that was led by Philip Mahoney, an executive vice chairman with Newmark.
The Sunnyvale building that Facebook now occupies is at 1180 Discovery Way. The company plans to move into the second of the three buildings sometime in 2020 and in the third building by late 2020 or sometime in early 2021, Hom estimated.
Facebook’s infrastructure, artificial reality, virtual reality, recruiting, facilities, global operations, and legal teams will have offices in the Sunnyvale complex.
“I look forward to Facebook continuing to grow in our city,” Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein said.
