SAN JOSE — Samsung acquired an office building in San Jose previously owned by Apple in a move that will enable Samsung to widen its Silicon Valley footprint.
Samsung Semiconductor bought the building at 3725 North First St. for $27 million in an all-cash deal, according to documents filed on Feb. 27 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office.
The office and research building is next to a major 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 St. in 2015. The campus totals 1.1 million square feet and includes a 10-story tower.
The one-story office building Samsung has now purchased from Apple totals 70,700 square feet, according to Property Shark. It was constructed in 1985.
The parcel totals 5.2 acres, which is a generous amount of 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 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 Rd. 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 weak Bay Area office market in recent years prompted the developers to scuttle their plans and instead sell the site to Super Micro Computer.
Despite Apple’s sale of its former building, it has taken preliminary steps to increase 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. The company’s iconic logos and campus designations have appeared near the existing 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.
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