Amazon Signs WeWork License for Mountain View Office Building

UPDATED DEC. 11 at 2:25 p.m.:

Is Silicon Valley’s listless office market springing back to life? Big deals by Amazon.com and other firms could point to a rebound in demand.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant struck a licensing deal with WeWork for 217,000 square feet in the office building at 401 San Antonio Road, taking workplaces that LinkedIn had previously subleased from WeWork, the San Jose Mercury News reported, citing unidentified sources.

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. A spokesperson for WeWork clarified that it’s not a lease or sublease, and Amazon is a client of WeWork with access to “new flexible workspaces in Silicon Valley.”

Tenants are also filling the building next door at 391 San Antonio Road. Both buildings, marketed by Colliers, are drawing a fresh round of office tenants, according to the newspaper.

The Amazon-WeWork arrangement comes on the heels of a deal by Snowflake to sublease 773,000 square feet of offices from Meta in Menlo Park, the biggest Bay Area office lease in more than a decade.

Add these to a string of deals at a new building in San Jose’s Santana Row, and market insiders see the beginning of an office bounce-back from double-digit vacancy brought on during the pandemic with its tech-led shift to remote work.

The vacancy in Silicon Valley was 22 percent in the third quarter ending in September, according to JLL. Cushman & Wakefield pegged it at a record 23 percent.

“When you see larger companies take big tranches of office space, smaller companies are going to follow suit,” Chad Leiker, a commercial broker at Kidder Mathews, told the Mercury News. “More and more companies in Silicon Valley will have people working in offices in 2025.

“If that happens, it will bring us closer to where we were in the old days.”

Correction: Previous article incorrectly described the Amazon.com deal as a lease rather than a licensing agreement.

— Dana Bartholomew