A decade ago, the downtown area of San Francisco in California, US, was home to high-profile tech companies such as Meta, Snap, Paypal, Airbnb, and more. However, most of these firms have relinquished their office space in the city over the past few years due to the pandemic-driven shift to hybrid work as well as mass tech layoffs.
Back in 2019, an estimated total of 16 million square feet of office space in San Francisco had been leased by the top 20 biggest tech employers, according to a report by The San Francisco Standard. Now, that area has declined to just 8.3 million square feet, the report said.
Elon Musk-owned social media company X is the latest tech firm to shutter its San Francisco-based headquarters while transferring most of its employees to its newly set-up base in Austin, Texas. Here’s a look at some of the other prominent tech companies that have vacated most of their office space in the city that neighbours Silicon Valley.
Meta
In January 2023, Meta announced mass layoffs as part of its cost-cutting efforts and went on to sublease all 34 floors of its office space in a skyscraper located in San Francisco’s Fremont area. While the tech giant has reportedly held onto a small space in the city, its main office is located in Menlo Park, California, US.
Snap
Snap, the parent company of social media platform Snapchat, closed its 33,000-square-foot office in San Francisco as part of a major reorganisation plan that led to over 1,200 of its employees being laid off, according to a report by Business Insider. While the Santa Monica-headquartered tech company does not have any offices currently in San Francisco, there is a Snap workplace in nearby Palo Alto.
Block
In August 2022, payment processing company Block did not renew its lease of its headquarters spanning over 4,70,000 square feet that was located in the Mid-Market area of San Francisco. The Jack Dorsey-founded firm said that it was looking to eliminate redundant real estate costs, as per reports. Its largest offices are now located in Oakland, California, US.
Uber
Months after Meta’s decision to close most of its offices in San Francisco, ride-hailing platform Uber vacated a majority of its spacious headquarters campus in the Mission Bay area. These buildings are now reportedly used by OpenAI, the startup behind AI model ChatGPT. However, Uber’s corporate headquarters is still in the Bay Area.
Salesforce
Cloud software company Salesforce reportedly reduced its office presence in San Francisco by 45 per cent after its real estate holdings in the city declined from 1.6 million square feet to 900,000 square feet. “Excluded from this amount is approximately 2 million square feet of leased and owned property in San Francisco that is currently leased to others, or available for lease, as we continued office space reductions in fiscal 2024,” the company said in a securities filing at the start of this year.
The AI silver lining?
However, San Francisco’s real estate sector is not likely to miss the tech companies that have pulled out so far as the city has now become a hub for AI startups.
A recent study by venture capital (VC) firm SignalFire shows that over 49 per cent of tech employees in the US call the San Francisco Bay Area their home, along with 12 per cent of startup founders backed by the biggest VCs as well as 52 per cent of employees who work for tech startups.
“We found that anecdotes about the decline of tech in San Francisco are overstated. SF still dominates all other U.S. cities when it comes to concentrations of tech talent and capital, and its lead is even larger when it comes to the recent AI boom,” the analysts were quoted as saying by TechCrunch.
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