Meta: Office Downsizing Prepares for "Workplace of Future"
Company aims for "best-in-class remote work" as it offers 435K SF in San Francisco for sublease.
Is Mark Zuckerberg planning to move Meta’s headquarters into his version of the metaverse?
That’s one interpretation of the spin accompanying the latest downsizing of its global office footprint by the Facebook parent, the listing for sublease of its 435K SF office at 181 Fremont Street in San Francisco.
After the company’s stock price—and a significant portion of Zuckerberg’s personal net worth—plummeted by nearly 70% last year, Meta has undertaken a rapid campaign to pare more than $2B from its balance sheet by downsizing its global office footprint, opting out of leases as well as listing properties for sublease.
Among other cuts, Meta offered for sublease 589K SF the company pre-leased in a tower that will be the tallest in Austin; declined an option to renew 250K SF in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards; vacated 200K SF of offices on NYC’s Park Avenue; and backed out of a deal to add 300K SF at 770 Broadway.
At the end of last month, Meta announced it will lay off 11,000 of its employees.
This week, as it revealed plans to vacate and sublease its Fremont Street office—which is leased through 2031—Meta raised a lot of eyebrows by declaring that the office downsizing represents “the future of work.” The company also said it intends to “lead the way” in building “a best-in-class remote work experience.”
“The future of work is here and we’re embracing it at Meta,” a Meta spokesperson said, in a statement to the San Francisco Business Times.
“The past few years have brought new possibilities around the role of the office, and we are prioritizing making focused, balanced investments to support our most strategic long-term priorities and lead the way in creating the workplace of the future. Our aim is to build a best-in-class remote work experience to help everyone do the best work of their careers no matter where they are,” the statement continued.
Meta recently shifted one of its strategic long-term priorities in a way that impacted on the social network’s data processing footprint: the tech giant halted construction on several data center expansion projects to reconfigure and redesign the data centers to support a new emphasis on artificial intelligence.
In the rapidly unfolding AI landscape, Microsoft has jumped out in front with its reported $10B investment in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, while Google has lured back founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in an effort to catch up with Google’s android-based AI language model.