Facebook moving headquarters from Palo Alto to former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park
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Facebook is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto to the nearby former home of Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park.
David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, formally announced the move Tuesday morning in a news conference at the 57-acre Menlo Park property.
Facebook signed a 15-year lease for the Menlo Park campus with the option to buy it in five years, according to a company spokeswoman who asked that she not be named because she was not authorized to speak on the details of the lease.
The world’s most popular social media website will start moving employees into the new campus in June or July and workers will probably continue to trickle into the new offices through late 2011 or early 2012. Facebook’s leases in Palo Alto last through 2013, according to a company statement.
The new campus is about six miles from the two Palo Alto locations that make up Facebook’s current headquarters.
The Menlo Park campus is made up of 11 buildings with about 1 million square feet of office space.
There are about 3,700 parking spaces at the Menlo Park campus. Facebook currently has more than 2,000 employees, with about 1,400 of them currently in Palo Alto, and is expected to grow its workforce.
The Menlo Park complex was built between 1993 and 1995 and was Sun’s headquarters until it was purchased by Oracle in January of last year.
Facebook also bought a nearby 22-acre tract of land that is connected to its soon-to-be headquarters by a tunnel underneath the Bayfront Expressway. The social networking giant made that purchase in preparation for a possible future expansion of the Menlo Park headquarters, the company said in a statement.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles