Broadcom Selling 1M SF of Palo Alto Campus

Semiconductor giant Broadcom has tapped CBRE to market nearly 1M SF of space spread across 13 buildings at the 105-acre, 1.5M campus at Stanford Research Center the firm acquired as part of its $69B acquisition of cloud-computing firm VMWare in November.

Broadcom announced last month that it is planning to occupy 600K SF at the Palo Alto campus, moving its headquarters from San Jose.

According to a release from CBRE, two of buildings encompassing 155K SF are leased to Toyota. The remaining 11 buildings will be delivered vacant, CBRE said, describing the listing as “one of the largest vacancies in Stanford Research Park since it opened.”

A CBRE team including Kyle Kovac, Mike Taquino, Joe Moriarty, Giancarlo Sangiacomo and Kati Thabit are representing Broadcom.

The property represents about 10 percent of the larger Stanford Research Park, which has about 700 acres and 10 million square feet of R&D and office space. The park has tenants including Tesla, Rivian, Hewlett-Packard and SAP.

Stanford has a policy of not selling land but deals instead in ground leases. VMWare signed a ground lease about 20 years ago covering 30 acres at the research park. In 2011, VMWare acquired a ground lease for 69.5 acres when it bought Roche’s campus at the park for $225M.

According to a report in the San Francisco Business Times, the ground lease on the former Roche campus expires in May 2046.

Broadcom will exit the property it has been occupying at 1320 Ridder Park Drive in San Jose, according to a report in the Silicon Valley Business Journal. The address for the company’s new HQ will be 3401 Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto.

Prior to the sale of VMware to Broadcom, VMware had initiate a flexible remote-work policy, but the new owner apparently will be requiring employees on the Palo Alto campus to return to the office, the report said.

The Journal quoted Broadcom CEO Hock Tan telling employees that “remote work does not exist at Broadcom,” according to an audio recording of a meeting at the company. The return-to-office policy applies to all employees living within 60 miles of a Broadcom office, the report said.

Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware on November 22 after receiving regulatory approval from China, a process which apparently accelerated after President Biden and President Xi’s met at the Asia-Pacific Summit in San Francisco in November, according to a report in Reuters.

Prior to the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom’s real estate footprint in the Bay Area included three buildings in North San Jose in addition to the Ridder Drive facility.