Uber is expanding its offices south, to the real Silicon Valley.
The ride-hailing company, whose headquarters are in San Francisco, has reportedly signed a lease for about 140,000 square feet of office space at the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto, Calif., as the SF Business Times first reported and Uber confirmed to Coins2Day. Uber is subleasing from VMware, a maker of cloud software, according to the report.
Uber plans to open its new office in the fall, the company said, and it will house primarily engineering teams.
The Palo Alto office will put Uber in the middle of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of much of the computer chip industry from which it get its name. Although often described as a Silicon Valley company, Uber’s San Francisco headquarters is actually outside the technology industry’s original home base by about 25 miles.
The new office would mark the third Bay Area office for the company after it expands to Oakland and moves to its new headquarters in San Francisco. In Oakland, Uber bought a former Sears building, which sits atop a subway station and will be home to up to 3,000 employees over 380,000 square feet. Uber also plans to move its headquarters to the Mission Bay neighborhood in San Francisco, where approximately 3,000 employees will work.
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It’s not surprising that Uber has decided to open an office in Palo Alto given the increasingly difficult commute between San Francisco and cities south of it (see case of “Google buses”). It can also make the company more attractive to prospective candidates who live closer to Palo Alto, including those working at nearby tech giants like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Apple.
“We are excited to continue investing in our home base by opening a South Bay engineering office in the fall of 2016,” Uber chief technology officer Thuan Pham said in a statement. “This new office will allow us to grow our teams and continue to attract world class engineering talent to make transportation as reliable as running water,” he added.
Stanford University owns the building where Uber plans to move, according to the SF Business Times. Tech news site The Information first reported that Uber was negotiating to lease the office.