From an office leasing standpoint, Meta was once bursting at the seams. Now, it’s continuing its multi-year contraction.
The company is closing three underutilized office buildings, spanning nearly 200,000 square feet, at its sprawling Dumbarton campus in Fremont, a spokesperson confirmed.
Workers from the buildings at 6591 Dumbarton Circle and 6520 Kaiser Drive will be asked to relocate to Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters, while those from 6504 Kaiser Drive will be redistributed to other buildings in the 1-million-square-foot campus.
In a memo sent this week to affected employees, the Meta facilities team called the move “an opportunity to optimize our space usage,” adding that the employee cafes “Meadows” and “Sweets Over the Bridge” will also be closing.
“That said, the team will continue to offer you delicious meals and delightful pastries!” management reassured workers.
Another perk that will be shuttered is the music room. Employees will have to collect musical instruments stored there, the memo said. Additionally, the “Helpdesk and Ship Happens” offices will be relocated to a location to be announced.
Facebook, as it was once known, ran out of room in its Menlo Park HQ after its initial public offering in 2012. The company subsequently went on a leasing spree that led to millions of square feet of new office development across the Bay Area.
One of its first moves was to go across the Dumbarton Bridge to Fremont, where the company built an entire office park starting in 2017, when it leased two office buildings from The Sobrato Organization before taking 14 from Peery Arrillaga the following year.
Around this time, the company also leased two new skyscrapers in San Francisco and 1 million square feet at a newly built campus in Sunnyvale.
Through the early days of the pandemic, Meta’s real estate team was still in growth mode. In 2021 and 2022, the social media giant committed to long-term leases at another Sunnyvale campus once occupied by NetApp and a 773,000-square-foot deal at the newly constructed Menlo Gateway near its original headquarters.
But the company quickly realized it had bitten off more than it could chew.
In Fremont, it subleased a 52,416-square-foot building to a pharmaceutical company, according to CoStar.
One of the San Francisco skyscrapers, at 181 Fremont, was left vacant after the pandemic shutdowns. The former NetApp campus was subleased to Walmart in 2023, while the Menlo Gateway campus was subleased to software company Snowflake at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, Meta’s longstanding ambition to revive the shuttered Dumbarton Rail Bridge into a new transit line, in order to alleviate traffic near its headquarters, was quietly shelved in 2021. The project would have cost an estimated $2.5 billion.
Those real estate moves coincided with three years of layoffs, as Meta tried to flatten its corporate structure and reorient its focus toward artificial intelligence.