Google ends agreement with lead developer of four California campuses

Google confirmed on Thursday that the company ended its agreement with the development partner that was working on four key campus sites.

Lendlease announced that Google decided to end the contracts it had to develop campuses in districts that included San Jose for a project called Downtown West, as well as in Sunnyvale for a site called Moffett Park. The other projects Lendlease had been working on were Middlefield Park and North Bayshore in Mountain View, which are collectively referred to as the San Francisco Bay Project.

The companies had worked together for the last four years. Google said it will be broadening its relationships and will work with both developers and capital partners to keep moving the campus developments forward and that it may include Lendlease.

“As we’ve shared before, we’ve been optimizing our real estate investments in the Bay Area, and part of that work is looking at a variety of options to move our development projects forward and deliver on our housing commitment,” said Alexa Arena, a senior director of development at Google. “We appreciate Lendlease and the work the team has done to get us to this point.”

Google conducted a comprehensive review of its real estate investments and concluded that market conditions deemed them “no longer mutually beneficial,” according to Lendlease.

Alphabet-owned Google is embarking on its most expansive cost cuts in its almost two decades on the public market. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth after head count swelled before and during the Covid pandemic. Despite seeing growth return, the company has continued making smaller cuts across the workforce, including in real estate.

In 2019, Lendlease struck a $15 billion deal with Google to spend the next 10 to 15 years redeveloping the company’s landholdings in the three…