Google has reportedly inked a big lease in an office building in Bellevue, Wash., while at the same time embarking on a massive expansion of the huge campus under construction in Amazon’s backyard in Seattle.
The search giant is taking 80,000 square feet at a building in Bellevue called One Twelfth @ Twelfth, with plans to lease another 30,000 square feet, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. The news comes a little more than a week after an announcement that Google will add a third block to a new office campus under construction in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, just north of Amazon’s headquarters.
It is unclear how big the new South Lake Union block will be, but previous permit filings with the city of Seattle showed plans for a 12-story, 322,000-square-foot structure there. A new building of that size, added to the 607,000 square feet of space under construction now, would bring the future Google campus size to nearly 930,000 square feet.
These moves portend potential for a massive expansion of the number of Googlers in the Seattle region in the coming years. Just a few months ago, the company acknowledged that it had about 3,000 people working in the Seattle area.
Google’s new leases come amid a growth spurt for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. Google parent Alphabet grew to more than 89,000 employees as of the end of June, up from 75,606 employees the year before, as quarterly revenues soared 26 percent to $32.7 billion.
The new Seattle campus could have room for upwards of 4,500 to 6,000 people, should the latest building reflect the previous permits. Add in the reported Bellevue office lease, and the company’s 375,000-square-foot campus in Kirkland, Wash., and the company could fit somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 people in its various offices.
Google has also been active leasing space in the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle, where it has a major presence now. And Google has long been rumored as a candidate to take a big chunk of space at a Kirkland project called Kirkland Urban that also counts Tableau Software and Wave Broadband as major tenants.
