San Jose officials have confirmed longtime rumors that Google is eyeing a massive landing around the Diridon Station area in downtown, where it could take up to 6 million square feet in office and R&D space, making it the company's largest campus in the country.
The Diridon Station area is envisioned by the city to be a huge, mixed-use development area surrounding several major transportation investments, including the addition of high-speed rail and electrifying the existing Caltrain route, an already popular transit mode that runs north and south along the Peninsula. Ultimately the area is expected to include publicly accessible plazas, ground-level retail, and a greenbelt and park along the Los Gatos Creek.
Join the conversation: Follow @SVbizjournal on Twitter, "Like" us on Facebook and sign up for our free email newsletters.
City officials said Tuesday that bringing Google in to fill in the office space slated for the area is a huge win for San Jose.
“We have been working for a project like this for decades," Vice Mayor Magdalena Carrasco said in a statement Tuesday. "The development of the Diridon area is at a critical juncture, this is the right place, the right time, with the right people, for the right reasons."
The announcement comes as Trammell Crow is set to build about 1 million square feet of office space alongside hundreds of apartments in the Diridon Station area in a development also named Diridon Station.
That massive project is easily already the largest planned development in the area, and the Dallas, Texas-based developer and real estate investor has been quietly scooping up more parcels nearby. The company last month also bought a couple of properties about a half-mile away, in a spot that is set to be zoned for tall, high-density buildings with office, residential, industrial or retail uses.
If all 6 million square feet of office space is built out for Google, the property could potentially accommodate 15,000 to 20,000 employees, according to a city press release Tuesday morning. That would be a huge move for the company, which currently employs about 20,000 people in all of Silicon Valley, according to data provided from Alphabet, Google's parent company, to the Silicon Valley Business Journal on May 24.
Google's largest campus in California today spans 3.1 million square feet at its headquarters in Mountain View, which sits north of San Jose.
“Silicon Valley’s center of gravity is shifting southward," Liccardo said in a statement Tuesday. "As we build Diridon to become the busiest multi-modal station in the West, the tens of thousands who will commute here daily will know that they have arrived in Silicon Valley’s urban center, and that Downtown San Jose has arrived.”