Facebook Is Now the Newest Kid on the Block in South Lake Union

Facebook is officially expanding its footprint in Seattle once again and is moving into 196,000-square-foot Arbor Blocks 300 East building in the citys South Lake Union neighborhood, which a Facebook spokesperson says can accommodate some 1,000 employees.

Facebook in 2016 preleased the office space in the six-story Arbor Blocks West and East office buildings at 333 Eighth Ave. N. and 300 Eight Ave. N., respectively prior to their construction, Vulcan Real Estate announced at the time. Facebook spokesperson Kyle Gerstenschlager confirms that the tech giant is now moving employees into the Arbor Blocks 300 East building.

The company has not yet moved into the adjacent 193,000-square-foot Arbor Blocks 333 West building, but Gerstenschlager says that is expected to happen in the next few months.

We’re excited to open our newest Seattle office at Arbor Blocks 300, says Vijaye Raji, Facebook Seattle head of office and vice president of entertainment. This office will support Facebooks growth in Seattle and help us attract people from the region’s tech community.

Gerstenschlager points out that Facebook opened its first Seattle office in 2010, with only three engineers. Today, it is the companys largest engineering office outside of Menlo Park, California, with more than 3,000 employees working across a variety of projects from infrastructure and machine learning to products like Messenger, Marketplace and Games, he adds.

A Seattle Business magazine story in the April edition points out that if all the announced and rumored deals come to fruition, Facebook would occupy the fourth-largest amount of office space in the Puget Sound region, with some 4 million square feet of space, trailing only Microsoft, Amazon and the Boeing Co.