Google buys Cisco building, widens north San Jose holdings
Purchase shows search giant is poised for dramatic expansion of its operations
SAN JOSE » Google has widened its north San Jose holdings with its purchase of a big office building from Cisco, a deal that gives the search giant ownership of 25 choice acres next to a light rail stop and a short distance from a future BART station.
The property purchase shows that Google is poised for a dramatic expansion of its operations in Silicon Valley, with north San Jose joining downtown San Jose as major areas of interest for the tech titan.
“Google seems to be looking down the field and is still seeing a strong future for expansion and economic growth in San Jose,” said Carl Guardino, president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
In the most recent deal, Google bought an office building from Cisco Technology at 225 W. Tasman Drive in San Jose, according to documents that were filed on April 1 in Santa Clara County.
Mountain View- based
Google now owns four office buildings and an adjacent parking garage on Tasman Drive near Champion Court.
The buildings Google bought from Cisco have addresses of 175, 225, 255, and 285 W. Tasman Drive. All the parcels are near the light rail line’s Champion Station.
Google paid Cisco $41.2 million in cash for the 225 W. Tasman building, the public property records show.
All told, Google has paid $164.2 million to obtain the sites on West Tasman. In early December, Google paid Cisco $123 million for the other Cisco buildings the Champion Court sites.
Yet it might be the 25 acres of land beneath the buildings that are the real prize for Google.
The buildings that Google bought from Cisco, which were constructed more than two decades ago in 1996, total a combined 553,000 square feet. As they exist today, that would be enough space to accommodate 2,200 to 2,800 Google workers.
Yet just a few doors down the street, at the corner of North First Street and West Tasman Drive, a unit of Samsung Electronics occupies a striking modern office campus of office towers that total 1.1 million square feet on a 9.4-acre site.
If Google were to raze the older Cisco buildings on Champion Court, develop the property with a similar density for which Samsung gained approval, and construct brand-new offices on the property, Google could conceivably create a huge campus of 2.5 million square feet.
A 25-acre site might also be large enough to accommodate a mix of offices and homes.
Google noted at the time of its December purchases that it’s still too soon to know what would be the intended use of the Cisco buildings or if they might be redeveloped.
Through its purchase of several buildings in north San Jose near Alviso, Google has quietly assembled what would be a huge tech campus. Google has paid $409.3 million to buy a mix of office and industrial buildings near North First Street and Nortech Parkway that together total 1.27 million square feet.
Just a bit further south, at the corner of North First Street and East Brokaw Road, Google has leased four buildings totaling 729,000 square feet from legendary development firm Peery Arrillaga.
In downtown San Jose near the increasingly busy Diridon train station, Google has proposed Downtown West, a transitoriented community of office buildings, homes, hotel facilities, shops, restaurants, entertainment hubs, cultural centers, and parks where the search giant could employ up to 25,000 workers.
The expansion plans by Google and other tech companies are a reminder that the regional and national economies will have to be revived in the wake of the coronavirus.
“One hopes that what Google is doing will help strengthen our area as we come out of this difficult time,” Guardino said. “We are going to need strong economic growth to fuel jobs and fill government coffers like we haven’t needed in decades.”