Google’s campus in Mountain View, known as the Googleplex, is already a massive piece of land which houses all the different divisions where thousands of individuals work to bring the world exciting technological products and services. Google keeps growing though, and to accommodate all the new people who seem to be continuously coming on board, they would need a new headquarters with more space. A few months back, Google’s plans for an even larger, sprawling campus made it out to the public showing off some of the renders of what the new HQ could look like. Google’s vision for this new set of buildings seemed to be a futuristic cluster that could readily be altered on the fly to accommodate new projects. To break ground on this new campus though, Google would first need the land for which they want it to sit on.
As it turns out, Google was in a dispute with LinkedIn over a piece of land which Google was hoping to use for the buildings of their new headquarters in Mountain View, a some 2.2 million square foot spread which both companies share a common interest in. At the time of reporting on May 5th, it wasn’t known who would end up scoring the huge chunk of land to advance their plans for expansion, but as of today LinkedIn has been awarded the majority of the space by the Mountain View city council in the amount of about 1.4 million square feet.
This not only limits Google to just a small portion of the land (about 515,000 square feet which is just enough for one of the four buildings) for which they need much more space if they were to complete their cluster of four buildings for the new campus, but it also puts a damper on their plans as a whole and could end up slowing the project down. As for LinkedIn, the decision of the city council to award them the majority of land means they can move forward with turning in the plans for their “mixed-use” project which would see the development of a new health club, theater and a string of six office buildings among other things. This decision however, is not an approval for LinkedIn’s project.