New building will house 400 employees

Apple is continuing its expansion of employees into nearby communities around its Cupertino headquarters. Having leased nearly all suitable business space in its own community, the company has taken to housing employees in nearby suburban towns such as Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. In addition to last month's five-year lease of the former Sunnyvale Research Center to accommodate up to 1,300 employees, the company is now leasing another office building nearby.

The San Jose Business Journal reports that Apple will place about 400 workers in a new 156,000 square-foot office building in the Sunnyvale Town Center. The complex Apple will be moving into was built in 2007 but fell on hard times during the ongoing economic recession, going into foreclosure under Wells Fargo Bank in 2009 and has been empty since then. The company is expected to move in later this year.

In addition to the Town Center and Research Center buildings, Apple also signed a lease for a two-building complex totalling 108,712 square feet on Benecia Avenue in Sunnyvale. It has also leased properties in Santa Clara and throughout Cupertino, usually striving to keep workers as close to the main headquarters as possible. Apple will be building a massive new "spaceship" style headquarters near its original one over the next few years, but the staggering growth of the company has lead some to wonder if even the much larger new design, said to be able to house 13,000 employees, will be sufficient.

Several other tech companies also lease office space in Sunnyvale, including AMD, Yahoo and most notably Google, which has a 2,900-employee campus there. [via San Jose Business Journal]

by MacNN Staff