Facebook could be relocating to a new premises in San Mateo County, California, foregoing its Palo Alto breeding ground.
Siliconvalley.com reports today that the social networking giant might have its sights set on buying Menlo Park in California, the 57-acre campus that housed about 3,000 Sun Microsystems employees before Oracle bought the computer maker for US$7.4bn in 2009.
With Facebook now employing about 2,000 employees, many of them squeezed into 150,000 sq feet, the move would make logistical sense.
According to Siliconvalley.com, Facebook declined to comment on the relocation reports yesterday, but it did say in a statement that it is evaluating a deal for a “long-term location to fit our growing business needs”.
Workers doing renovations at the former Sun campus said they were preparing at least one building for Facebook to move into as soon as June.
“They didn’t want us to tell anybody that it’s Facebook; I don’t know why,” said an employee with SC Builders of Sunnyvale to Siliconvalley.com.
Facebook set up base in Palo Alto in June 2004.
Digital Sky and Goldman Sachs
Meanwhile, a Bloomberg story today details how the Digital Sky Technologies co-Founder Yuri Milner recruited analysts from Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley to help him pick investments in start-ups such as Facebook and Zynga Game Network Inc.
Digital Sky paired with the New York-based securities firm Goldman Sachs to buy a US$500m stake that values Facebook at US$50bn, in a deal announced yesterday.
It is understood that US$450m of the latest investment comes from Goldman Sachs and US$50m came from DST and that a further US$1bn could be raised from Goldman Sachs’ high net worth clients.
