Meta is backing out of another office building in Bellevue's Spring District as its Seattle-area workforce shrinks and the company shifts focus toward artificial intelligence.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant officially put the roughly 212,000-square-foot Block 13 building on the market for sublease in June, according to marketing materials from commercial brokerage CBRE. It's the third building in the Spring District development preleased to Meta that the company let go.
Block 13 has sat vacant and unfinished for two years now, fueling speculation that Meta would give up on occupying the building. But permit application records from earlier this year filed with the city of Bellevue to continue work on Block 13 showed renewed interest from the tech giant.
In a reversal, Meta is subleasing Block 13.
Meta declined to comment Wednesday.
The mixed-use Spring District development sits northeast of downtown Bellevue, and developers first broke ground in 2013. The complex includes apartments and office buildings. In 2018, Meta — then named Facebook — preleased its first building in the area.
Meta soon made a major push in the area by leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space over the next couple of years. It also bought an unused 400,000-square-foot office building in the Spring District from REI in 2020.
Since then, the company's workforce in the Seattle area exploded, reaching 8,800 in 2022. But remote work lingered, causing the company to rethink its space needs. Meta also went through multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and this year, shrinking its head count in the region to 5,600, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.
At one point, Meta planned to occupy seven buildings, including the one it bought from REI. The company also had expansion rights for five additional buildings that were not developed yet.
With plans to back out of Block 13, Meta has now offered three of those seven buildings for sublease, one of which was scooped up by the Bay Area artificial intelligence firm Snowflake.
In October, Meta also signaled it was giving up on plans to dominate the Spring District when it let the expansion rights for the five planned buildings lapse, according to King County records.
Meta's shifting real estate footprint in the Seattle area extends beyond Bellevue. The company has given up several offices in Seattle, including the Arbor Blocks office complex, which served as the company's de facto Northwest headquarters when it was named Facebook. Apple has since swooped in to pick up the lease.
The Seattle area's rise as a major engineering hub for Meta was fueled by the company's metaverse ambitions. After Meta acquired Oculus, the precursor to Meta’s Quest virtual reality headsets, the company had offices in Sodo in addition to its South Lake Union offices.
As Meta poured billions of dollars a year into its metaverse-driven Reality Labs division, the company rapidly expanded in the Seattle area from 2020 through 2023 by snapping up office space in Bellevue and lab space in Redmond to develop virtual reality technology and hardware.
But as the metaverse fizzles out and Meta shifts its resources to AI, the company's subsequent layoffs have hit the Puget Sound region hard.
The company has laid off almost 1,900 Seattle-area employees, including 845 Bellevue workers, this year.
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