UPDATE: Facebook confirmed that it has leased 338,000 square feet in the Block 16 building.
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Facebook is starting to rival Amazon in terms of its voracious appetite for office space in the Seattle area.
The latest development is a lease of an 11-story building in the Spring District project in Bellevue, Wash. A “memorandum of lease” filed with King County, first spotted by the Puget Sound Business Journal and later obtained by GeekWire, shows that the social giant is taking the Block 16 building. Facebook signed on for a 13-year lease with renewal options totaling an additional 12 years.
Facebook has been linked to the Spring District for months, though neither the company, nor Spring District developer Wright Runstad has commented publicly. Facebook has in recent months leased space in several buildings in downtown Bellevue.
The Spring District is a 36-acre, 16-block mixed-used development built around a future light rail station that will be home to a new headquarters for outdoor retailer REI. It is also the site of the Global Innovation Exchange, the technology innovation graduate program created by the University of Washington, Tsinghua University and Microsoft. According to the project website, Block 16 will be ready for occupancy in 2020.
Seattle represents Facebook’s largest engineering center outside of its Menlo Park, Calif. home base, and the company has been growing all over the region in recent years.
Facebook opened a large new office building in Seattle last year, less than two years after opening another building nearby. Another new office project in the same neighborhood of South Lake Union — which is also home to Amazon and the huge Google campus that is under construction — is on the way.
Out in Redmond, Wash — right in Microsoft’s backyard — a campus for Oculus/Facebook Reality Labs is expanding rapidly. Facebook has been on a hiring spree for more than a year now, and it has more open positions in Redmond than any Oculus office outside Menlo Park.
The Redmond campus for Oculus could soon be even larger than Facebook’s Seattle presence. The company is reportedly teeing up a 650,000-square-foot office project under the mysterious moniker of “Building X” on a site it bought earlier this year. The project would push the growing Redmond campus well over 1 million square feet.
Facebook said late last year that it has more than 3,000 employees in the Seattle area, up from 2,000 in March. With all the new office space it is leasing, the social giant’s presence is set to grow exponentially in the coming years.
This was originally posted on GeekWire.
