News broke on Friday that the Bay Area's arguably fastest-growing enterprise, Uber, has inked a deal for a huge new global headquarters in Mission Bay, on land that was formerly part of the huge planned Salesforce campus that cloud computing company gave up after deciding to move to the Transbay Tower. The ever-expanding Uber, showing no fear that it will fall victim to a bubble, went in on a joint venture with developer Alexandria Real Estate Equities to purchase two parcels of Salesforce's former 14 acres (most of which is going to the Warriors stadium project) worth $125 million, as the Business Times reports.
And Salesforce made a tidy profit on the deal, with Uber/Alexandria paying $210 per square foot for the land, after Salesforce originally paid paid $137 per buildable square foot for the larger property back in 2010.
The plan is to build a 422,980-square foot "iconic" office campus which Uber would lease from Alexandria for a guaranteed 15 years. This comes in addition to Uber's recent announcement that they'd be occupying a total of 220,000 square feet at their current headquarters building at 1455 Market, where they plan to stay for the time being, adding a recent 130,434 square feet to their footprint. The company currently has almost 600 people on the payroll, with obvious plans to employ many more.
So, even if they're using shady tactics to squelch competition, and even if the insurance status of UberX drivers remains a big question mark, the company shows no signs of slowing down anytime ever, and has made a firm commitment to staying in San Francisco.
And yes, on a positive note, it's possible they could end up being bigger than Facebook. Maybe.
