Like other big tech companies, Google has spent the past few years trimming its workforce and shrinking its office footprint by millions of square feet. But this week, the company officially opened a Silicon Valley campus that serves as a reminder Google is still one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest corporate occupants.
The unveiling of Meadow Point, one of the tech giant’s largest Bay Area campuses, caps a years-long process in which Google has been buying up empty and underused properties in north San Jose.
The new campus consists of 10 properties, including six office buildings that house Google’s “Core” team that builds the technical foundation behind its flagship products — from its web browser Chrome to its artificial intelligence tool Gemini — as well as online safety and IT infrastructure. The other three properties are lab and industrial facilities that have already been up and running.
The properties add up to nearly 800,000 square feet, plus an additional building a spokesperson said the company is considering adding to the campus. Meadow Point will ultimately be big enough to house thousands of “Googlers,” though the company declined to give specifics on the number of employees or the total square footage.
During the opening event in a sunny outdoor courtyard surrounded by native California plants and trees, guests lunched on artisanal sandwiches and lemon mint spa water. Executives and officials touted the campus as a “restorative” environment for workers that pays homage to the natural beauty of the region as well as the local Alviso neighborhood’s history as a 19th-century port and locale for several subsequent industries, including the nation’s third-largest cannery.
“This is definitely a place that would make me want to come to work every day,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a moderate Democrat and former tech executive himself who is running for governor in California. He likened the Meadow Point campus to a “botanic garden.”
'Just a parking lot'
Google has spent well over $400 million since 2018 on the collection of buildings that make up Meadow Point, many of which had stood empty for years following an earlier tech boom that yielded a spate of speculative properties in the area that never fulfilled their original promise. The two curved main office buildings at 4300 and 4400 N. First St., for example, were built by Cisco Systems in 2001 during the dot-com boom but never occupied by the company.
“This space we’re in now was really just a parking lot,” said Scott Foster, Google’s vice president of real estate and workplace services, gesturing to the trees and flowers at Meadow Point’s meticulously landscaped courtyard.
The buildings’ original office cubicles were replaced by a variety of carefully curated spaces for all manner of “heads-down” and collaborative work, from workstations with overhead shades to prevent screen glare to nooks with plush chairs.
“Everybody gets natural views,” said Real Estate Project Executive Eugene Hu on a press tour of the new offices, explaining that special care had been taken to ensure that workers had access to natural light and windows that can be opened to allow in a breeze.
Flight to quality 1.0
Tech firms have been working to cut their expansive office portfolios amassed before the pandemic and as priorities shift amid the AI boom. Google has vacated some 3 million square feet of leased office space in recent years as part of a sweeping effort to rein in expenses.
With that wave of technology world belt-tightening in recent years came cutbacks to Silicon Valley’s famous “perks culture” of competing for talent with luxury amenities from gourmet snacks to off-campus retreats. Google pioneered a version of what is currently described as “the flight to quality” in offices back in 1999 when it famously hired a massage therapist for its then 40-person startup staff.
While no in-person masseuses were visible at Meadow Point, the company’s famous “microkitchens” were ubiquitous — there is at least one on every floor — as well as libraries and game rooms and a fitness center. Joe Kearney, another project executive, added that outdoor pickleball and beach volleyball courts are in the works in addition to the existing basketball court.
The office interiors pay homage to local history. A display of knots celebrates Alviso’s heritage as a boat-building community in the 1960s, while a wall of cans includes some actual relics of the Bayside Canning Company, which shuttered in 1936.
City Councilmember David Cohen declared the area “the future of tech and commerce in Silicon Valley,” where officials aim to eventually build some 20,000 new homes.
The office opening comes as Google shifts other things around in its home region. The firm is planning to move its cloud computing division into Sunnyvale’s Caribbean office campus, consolidating the unit. As a result, the company will ditch at least 500,000 square feet it has been leasing at the Moffett Place complex, about a mile away.
Silicon Valley rebound
The region’s long-standing dependence on the tech industry left it vulnerable following the pandemic shift to remote work. Yet a flurry of deals among a spectrum of established companies and fast-growing startups resulted in the global tech capital reporting its highest quarterly leasing volume since 2022.
San Jose's office market in the second quarter of 2026 is showing early signs of stabilization following a string of difficult years. Leasing has strengthened to its highest level since 2022. While vacancy remains elevated by historical standards, “the direction of travel has shifted toward gradual improvement, supported by a modest rebound in tenant confidence and a clear bifurcation between high‑quality and older assets,” according to CoStar Research.
Meanwhile, Google’s plans to transform a flagging industrial area of downtown San Jose into a vibrant village filled with gleaming new offices, apartments, hotels, shops and parks remains on hold.
Approved by San Jose officials in 2021, the long-awaited development proposed 4,000 housing units in addition to office, retail and hospitality properties situated around Diridon Station, a major downtown transit hub. Google paused the project after the first demolition phase in 2023, and since then, little progress has been made.