Menlo Park, California — More growth appears in Facebook’s future as the seven-year old social-networking giant has secured new digs with space for 6,100 employees, up from 2,000, and is now renovating a new 9-building, 57-acre campus it plans to move into this summer. Facebook on Tuesday formally announced plans to move its fast-growing operations to a sprawling Silicon Valley campus in Menlo Park, once home to Sun Microsystems.
Facebook, which turned seven years old this month, in the latest sign of growing pains, the social networking behemoth, fresh from an infusion of investor cash that raised its value to $50 billion, is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, Calif., to bigger digs in nearby Menlo Park in the San Francisco Bay Area, to house its increasing employees already cramped in the space it moved into in the city of Palo Alto in early 2009.
The vastly laid one-million-square foot Sun Microsystems campus in the city of Menlo Park, which borders Palo Alto, has nine buildings with an office space set on 57 acres of land, according to Facebook director of real estate John Tenanes.
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Facebook flies into the Sun: in addition to purchasing the old Sun Microsystems campus.
At a press conference this morning announcing the new headquarters, the company said it would begin the shift later this year. “We have obviously very excited,” said Menlo Park mayor Rich Cline. “This was a highly anticipated announcement.”
Facebook is also buying two adjacent buildings, 22-acre lot from US car maker General Motors.
“We have been looking for a setting where we can plant some roots,” Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman said while unveiling the plan with city officials at Menlo Park City Hall.
“One of our priorities as we rebuild the campus will be to make it a fun place to be. We are in this for the long term,” Ebersman said.
Facebook was established in a Harvard dorm room, and when the social networking unit first moved west, Mark Zuckerberg and his groups set up a workplace inside a cheap rental house just down the road from Menlo Park in Palo Alto, California. The company’s first official office was in downtown Palo Alto, but in 2009 the company moved a few blocks away, into a massive hanger formerly occupied by HP spinoff Agilent.
Facebook says it has been looking for a more-permanent space that suits its long-term business needs and allows it to recreate the “small-community feel” it has enjoyed at its current Palo Alto location, and rumors suggests that it was eyeing the old Sun campus, which is only 6 miles from the company’s existing offices.
“We are grateful for the tremendous support we received from Federal, State and local officials as we contemplated the move, and we look forward to being a productive member of the Menlo Park community,” the company said in its announcement.
Facebook has shared the following concept sketches of what the new campus will look like:
A sample image of what Facebook’s new campus might look like after it takes over Sun’s old buildings in Menlo Park. s(Credit: Facebook)
The sprawling campus was built in 1994 and 1995, and it housed Sun until it and its open source ambitions sadly disappeared into Oracle. The barren industrial park will be a big cultural shift from the university neighborhood employees are used to. So Facebook will simply build its own “urban atmosphere,” adding shops and amenities to the courtyard running in between the two rows of buildings.
The old Sun campus will give Facebook tons of room to expand, with 3,700 parking spaces and a total of about 1 million square feet in office space. The campus already possesses an amphitheater, a fitness gym, a basketball court, and two cafes, which the company will “repurpose and rebuild in the Facebook way,” said John Tenanes, director of global real estate. “Our chef is excited about that.”
Two pictures of the current campus follow below:
Part of the current Sun/Oracle campus in Menlo Park, soon to be home to Facebook. (Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)
About one-third of the campus is fenced off with active construction work taking place, presumably in line with Facebook’s expectation that it will be able to move in by June or July. (Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)
Facebook currently employs over 2,000 people worldwide, backing a website that boasts over 500 million users. About 1,400 of those employees are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and today, the company said it is moving in part because it believes it will continue to grow. The first group of employees will move in June or July. The current office on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto will remain in operation until the end of 2011 and possibly into 2012.
On a presumably unrelated note, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has filed a restraining order against Pradeep Manukonda, a guy who has tried to “follow, surveil and contact” him using “language threatening his personal safety” and the safety of his girlfriend and sister, according to TMZ.
The order of protection requires Pradeep to stay 300 feet away from Zuckerberg, his sister, Randi, and his girlfriend.