Real Estate for Autonomous Car Facilities Gains Movement in Silicon Valley
May 05 2016 - 8:34PM
Dow Jones News
By Eliot Brown
Apple Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc. and several car makers
are seeking large expanses of real estate in the San Francisco Bay
Area for their autonomous-car operations, a top landlord in the
area said Thursday, illustrating Silicon Valley's growing
importance in the auto industry.
Victor Coleman, chief executive of Hudson Pacific Properties
Inc., told analysts that "we are seeing a definitive movement" from
autonomous-car research-and-development facilities, which "seem to
be a hot demand item."
"We're seeing the Toyotas of the world, the Teslas of the world,
BMWs, Mercedes. Ford now is out in the marketplace looking for
space," he said on the landlord's quarterly investor call. "I
haven't even mentioned the 400,000 square feet that Google's
looking to take down and the 800,000 square feet that Apple's
looking to take down for their autonomous cars as well."
Such spaces would be large, but car factories tend to be much
larger. Tesla's auto-making plant in nearby Fremont, Calif., is
about 5.3 million square feet. Apple's new under-construction
headquarters is about 2.8 million square feet, while Google's
headquarters are about 4.8 million square feet. Both companies
lease millions of additional square feet nearby.
Apple declined to comment. Alphabet representatives did not
immediately respond to requests for comment.
Hudson Pacific is one of the largest landlords in the area, with
offices throughout Silicon Valley and San Francisco, where its
buildings are home to the headquarters of Square Inc. and Uber
Technologies Inc.
The remarks on driverless cars came as Mr. Coleman was seeking
to explain that demand is still strong in Silicon Valley despite
concerns about the health of the tech sector. Earlier in the call,
he said growth in San Francisco was moderating -- a shift in tone
that worried some analysts on the call given that tech companies
account for a large chunk of the company's income.
Alphabet has been quite public about its driverless-car
ambitions, but Apple has been far more tight-lipped. Apple is in
the process of expanding a team that had about 600 employees last
year, according to people familiar with the matter.
--Daisuke Wakabayashi contributed to this article.
Write to Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 05, 2016 20:19 ET (00:19 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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