Tech titans strike deal for purchase of big San Jose office building
SAN JOSE — Samsung has bought from Apple a big office building in San Jose, a deal that would enable the tech and consumer electronics titan to widen its Silicon Valley footprint.
An office building at 3725 North First Street that Apple had owned was bought by Samsung Semiconductor for $27 million, according to documents filed on Feb. 27 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office.
The office and research building is next to a huge Samsung regional hub at North First Street and West Tasman Drive in north San Jose.
Samsung Semiconductor moved into its campus at 3655 North First Street in 2015. The campus totals 1.1 million square feet and includes a 10-story tower.
The one-story office building that Samsung has just bought totals 70,700 square feet, according to the Property Shark commercial real estate database. Samsung bought the building from Apple through an all-cash deal, the county documents show.
The property was empty this week, a direct observation of the site by this news organization this week determined. The office building was constructed in 1985.
The parcel that Samsung Semiconductor bought totals 5.2 acres, which is a generous amount land compared to the size of the office building atop it.
If the existing building were bulldozed, Samsung could replace it with a modern and significantly larger office structure.
As an example of high-density uses, the 1.1-million-square-foot regional office center and parking structure that Samsung owns next door occupy a lot that totals 9.4 acres.
In recent years, a real estate group pursued the development of a tech campus a few miles away. The proposed campus would have produced 1.92 million square feet of office space, including multiple towers.
The 19.7-acre development site was at 550 East Brokaw Road in north San Jose at the location of a long-shuttered Fry’s Electronics store. The proposed office buildings would have consisted of four times as much square footage as the land on which they would have sprouted.
Ultimately, a feeble Bay Area office market in the wake of the coronavirus and resulting business shutdowns prompted the developers to scuttle their plans and instead sell the site to Super Micro Computer.
As for the 3725 North First Street site, the 5.2-acre parcel that Samsun now owns might be able to accommodate a modern office building totaling 200,000 to 500,000 square feet.
Despite Apple’s sale of this building, Apple has taken preliminary steps to increase its staffing levels elsewhere in north San Jose.
Near the corner of Orchard Parkway and Charcot Avenue, Apple owns an 85-acre site that consists primarily of empty land and two large office buildings.
Apple’s iconic logos and campus designations have appeared on Orchard Parkway near the two existing office buildings.
Despite these changes that began to emerge in the past year, Apple’s plans for the office properties it owns at the Orchard and Charcot sites weren’t immediately clear.