Apple eyes new San Jose campus possibly sprawling over 4.15M square feet
Apple is working with the city of San Jose on a development agreement for a campus on the north side of town, which if authorized could be larger than Cupertino's Campus 2 at 4.15 million square feet, a report said on Wednesday.
A draft version of the agreement isn't yet finished, but should be presented to the city's Planning Commission sometime this month, said the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Under current terms development rights would be locked in for 15 years, and the campus would spread within 86 acres next to Orchard Parkway, Component Drive, and Guadalupe Parkway.
Apple has yet to submit an official development proposal, but if it exploits the full 4.15 million square feet, the campus would dwarf even its future "spaceship" headquarters in Cupertino.
Last month Apple signed a lease on a part of the acreage, owned by realty firm Steelwave. The company also owns neighboring real estate sold by Ellis Partners and Lowe Enterprises, the latter planned to offer at least 1.8 million square feet.
Apple's plans for the new office space are still unknown. One possibility is that Apple will need it to support its automotive ambitions, which include an electric car and possibly self-driving technology. The company is believed to be on a major hiring spree for the effort, which could see the first car roll off assembly lines in 2019 or 2020.
A draft version of the agreement isn't yet finished, but should be presented to the city's Planning Commission sometime this month, said the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Under current terms development rights would be locked in for 15 years, and the campus would spread within 86 acres next to Orchard Parkway, Component Drive, and Guadalupe Parkway.
Apple has yet to submit an official development proposal, but if it exploits the full 4.15 million square feet, the campus would dwarf even its future "spaceship" headquarters in Cupertino.
Last month Apple signed a lease on a part of the acreage, owned by realty firm Steelwave. The company also owns neighboring real estate sold by Ellis Partners and Lowe Enterprises, the latter planned to offer at least 1.8 million square feet.
Apple's plans for the new office space are still unknown. One possibility is that Apple will need it to support its automotive ambitions, which include an electric car and possibly self-driving technology. The company is believed to be on a major hiring spree for the effort, which could see the first car roll off assembly lines in 2019 or 2020.
Comments
Besides, if you're going to be making cars, the Southeastern U.S. is the place to be. It's where auto and aircraft manufacturing have migrated and where the most modern factories are. The cost of living and the regulatory climate make manufacturing in California too costly.
Not good, doing almost all your hiring in one state. When some regulatory push comes along%u2014and there are a lot of those connected to auto making%u2014it helps to have members of Congress who see all those jobs in their district.
Besides, if you're going to be making cars, the Southeastern U.S. is the place to be. It's where auto and aircraft manufacturing have migrated and where the most modern factories are. The cost of living and the regulatory climate make manufacturing in California too costly.
I agree, but I think it's unlikely they will be doing manufacturing at that site. The two buildings shown in the rendering in the AI article are almost fully built (I cycle past them on my way to work every day), and they are clearly office buildings.
I know Tesla are doing car manufacturing in the Bay Area, but I think that's more because they got a stellar deal on an already constructed auto factory. I can't see Apple building an auto factory from scratch in the Bay Area.
Looks like sprawl to me. Any decent transit available out there?
Not sure what you mean by "looks like sprawl", but there is transit. The Component VTA stop is easy walking distance to this site.
It's definitely not sprawl, it's just north of the airport. Guadalupe Parkway is also known as HW-87 (a 6 lane freeway), and that area is very close to 101 as well (8 lanes there). Beyond the HW-87 and US-101 interchange is San Jose International Airport.
That said, the area around 101 and 87 is a commute bottleneck now, so if you have a lot more workers going in there then they'd certainly need to look at tweaking the freeways.
Not good, doing almost all your hiring in one state. When some regulatory push comes along%u2014and there are a lot of those connected to auto making%u2014it helps to have members of Congress who see all those jobs in their district.
When people do the copy/paste thing into AI forums, it shows the astroturf posts for what they are, since AI doesn't have proper Unicode support which renders your em-dashes as %u2014.
This place is just a few miles away from my house. Apple, here I'm coming;)
Oh my, I guess Apple hasn’t gotten the message that it is Doomed™. It looks like Apple intends to keep growing.
Oh my, I guess Apple hasn’t gotten the message that it is Doomed™. It looks like Apple intends to keep growing.
Unless I keep reading different posts about the same spot of land, Apple seems to be in need of unbelievable amounts of office space beyond the original and spaceship campuses. Aside from the possibility (which I still have a hard time believing in spite of the evidence) of an Apple car and aside from all the server farms, I really have to wonder why Apple needs so much space for employees unless they're working on some other ginormous project that we don't know about yet. It's still a company with a relatively small product line, even with the addition of the watch and the new Apple TV.
Since Apple is so secretive, we'll never see it, but I'd love to see some kind of analysis as to how many employees are dedicated to which category of job: how many work on each flavor of the OS's, how many on hardware development, how many on operations, manufacturing, sourcing, marketing, sales, HR, administration, etc. Also, much has been written about Jobs' original intention for the spaceship campus to encourage interaction. Secrecy and security issues aside for the moment (which would discourage interaction), how can you have such interaction when employees are spread across many different campuses? It's one thing to isolate automotive development, since that's so different from anything else Apple has done so far, but it's quite another to keep other groups of employees apart.
"Something's going on, but we don't know what it is..."
Not good, doing almost all your hiring in one state. When some regulatory push comes along%u2014and there are a lot of those connected to auto making%u2014it helps to have members of Congress who see all those jobs in their district.
Besides, if you're going to be making cars, the Southeastern U.S. is the place to be. It's where auto and aircraft manufacturing have migrated and where the most modern factories are. The cost of living and the regulatory climate make manufacturing in California too costly.
Except for the fact that the markets for EV's aren't in the South; they are on the East and West coasts, and as many of the components are coming from Asia, California makes the most sense for companies such as Apple to develop and assemble their EV's for the next decade. Frankly, labor costs are not a great issue in highly automated facilities of companies like Tesla that make relatively high margins.
Sure, some volume EV production will ultimately move to the Southeastern U.S., but that's a long way off, and right now, the demand for EV's is extremely strong in California and the West Coast.
Yes.
Microsoft is smaller than Apple, doesn't do much manufacturing, maintains a similar set of software products and services, designs fewer hardware products, doesn't have a retail operation to speak if, and employs about 110,000 people. At 200 square feet per person that would require 22,000,000 square feet of space. Not all of those would be located near corporate headquarters, but Apple likely needs more employees than Microsoft, thus even more space.
4 million square feet of additional space every three years isn't too surprising, given the growth rate and the number of new products and services.