Hunter Partners JV Lands AI Firm for Bay Area Building
The property is part of a mixed-use development with 1 million square feet of planned office space.
Databricks, a rapidly growing data and artificial intelligence company, is expanding its footprint in the San Francisco Bay Area with the full-building lease of a newly delivered 305,000-square-foot property in Silicon Valley.
The San Francisco-based firm expects to move into 200 W. Washington Ave. in downtown Sunnyvale, Calif., in late 2026.
It is one of two seven-story office buildings in the Cityline transit-oriented, mixed-use development constructed by Hunter Partners and Sares Regis Group of Northern California. The third component is The Martin, a 12-story, 479-unit residential building.
The developers topped out all three buildings in the live-work-play neighborhood in May 2023. The properties were completed last year. An earlier phase featured parking, residential and retail space and a third phase is planned with additional residential space. At full build-out, Cityline is expected to comprise 1,000 apartments, 1 million square feet of office space and more than 500,000 square feet of retail.
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Vincent Scott and Mike Benvento of CBRE are handling office leasing at Cityline.
Expanding client reach
Databricks said the strategic location in Sunnyvale will deepen its partnerships with current South Bay customers like Adobe, Barracuda Networks, Cisco, Intuit, McAfee, Netgear and NVIDIA, while positioning it to reach new clients.
The firm intends to use the new space to empower Databricks product and engineering teams to deliver more AI solutions for the region’s leading enterprises. Databricks’ South Bay R&D team has doubled over the past two years, and the company is projecting it will double again over the next two years, or possibly sooner.
“Sunnyvale was a great fit for us based on proximity to our existing South Bay location, building amenities and transit options downtown,” a Databricks spokesperson told Commercial Property Executive.
Databricks also leases about 47,000 square feet at 351 E. Evelyn Ave. in Mountainview, Calif. The spokesperson said the company was still determining whether to retain that space or move all the Silicon Valley employees into the new Cityline space in 2026.
The company will also be moving its headquarters into nine floors at One Sansome St., a 42-story, 738,880-square-foot tower in San Francisco’s North Financial District, in 2026. The building, which was the first in San Francisco to achieve LEED Platinum v4 certification in 2014, was recertified at the LEED Platinum level in April 2024. Databricks announced in March that it was leasing the space at One Sansome St. as part of a $1 billion commitment to its San Francisco operations over the next three years.
“We’re targeting the second half of 2026 to move teams into the new San Francisco and Sunnyvale offices,” the Databricks spokesperson told CPE. “Across all our markets, growth is strong, so we’ll work to support that with expanded office space when it makes sense.”
Growing AI influence
More than 15,000 organizations around the world rely on Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for data analytics and AI solutions. The company, which currently has its headquarters at 160 Spear St. in San Francisco, has offices throughout the U.S. including in Seattle; Atlanta; Chicago; Denver, New York City; Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Cambridge, Mass.; and Plano, Texas. The global company also has offices in Toronto and Vancouver, B.C., in Canada, as well as in Brazil, Costa Rica, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
In March, Databricks also committed to hosting its annual Data + AI Summit in San Francisco for five more years. The event is expected to attract more than 20,000 this year and expand to nearly 50,000 by 2030. The company stated its investments underscore its confidence in San Francisco as the AI epicenter.
Databricks is just one of many AI companies helping to revitalize San Francisco’s office market, which took a big hit during and after the Covid pandemic. Over the past three years, AI-based companies have dominated tenant activity in San Francisco. There are more than three times as many AI companies (825) in the Bay Area as in New York City, which is the next most concentrated market with 237, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Those numbers are expected to keep growing. In a report released earlier this year, Cushman & Wakefield forecast a 200 percent growth in GenAI companies over the next two years in the Bay Area.
In addition to leasing office and R&D space, commercial real estate experts note AI companies value in-office work for collaboration. As start-ups receive more venture capital funding and grow their businesses, they need more office space and many, like Databricks, are also seeking high-quality, tech-enabled spaces.
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