Google widens Sunnyvale holdings with building purchase

Tech titan spends billions in recent years to buy Silicon Valley properties

SUNNYVALE » Google has bought a large Sunnyvale building, extending a shopping spree that totals in the billions of dollars in recent years in that Silicon Valley city alone.

The most recent purchase by Google is a twostory building at 165 Gibraltar Court, which is just one of well over 50 properties that the search giant has bought in Sunnyvale within the last three years.

While the latest Silicon Valley property acquisition by Google is only a piece of the expanding mosaic that the tech titan has cobbled together in Sunnyvale, it’s also part of what has emerged as a mini-cluster of mid-sized office buildings that are adjacent to each other.

In the most recent Sunnyvale deal, Google paid $28.5 million for the 165 Gibraltar office building, according to Santa Clara County property documents that were filed on April 14.

In 2017, Google bought adjacent buildings at 160 Gibraltar Court, 1265 Borregas Ave., and 1212 Bordeaux Drive. Those three sites were part of a 50-building purchase in July 2017 by

Google that marked a stunning expansion of the company’s real estate empire in Silicon Valley.

By late 2017, Google’s 50- building acquisition, when combined with other transactions that included separate deals to buy several big buildings and land from NetApp, had pushed the value of the tech titan’s shopping cart to at least $1 billion.

As eye- catching as all this activity was, Google’s Sunnyvale shopping spree swelled dramatically last year.

In a July 2019 mega-deal, Google paid $1 billion for several Sunnyvale sites that had been held by Yahoo and its owner, Verizon Media.

The deal with Yahoo and

Verizon came just eight months after Google paid $1 billion in November 2018 for a huge research and office campus in Mountain View just down the street from the company’s Googleplex headquarters.

Mountain View- based Google is also busy with multiple major campuses in San Jose, including three on the city’s north side and one downtown.

Google’s Downtown West development in downtown San Jose is a transitoriented neighborhood of office buildings, homes, restaurants, shops, hotels, cultural amenities, and entertainment hubs near the Diridon train station.

The company’s endeavors in San Jose alone could create enough office space for at least 37,000 jobs — and potentially many more depending on Googe’s ultimate uses of certain sites in the Bay Area’s largest city.