OpenAI will soon have a Bay Area base outside of San Francisco.
The company behind ChatGPT signed a lease this week to rent a 439,000-square-foot campus in Mountain View, located at 350 and 380 Ellis St. The lease is for 10 years, sources say.
The campus, which has three office buildings, was once home to Norton LifeLock, which departed in 2021.
San Francisco-based TMG Partners acquired the campus during the pandemic in a partnership with Goldman Sachs but later handed the property back to lender KKR through a deed in lieu of foreclosure.
Sources say OpenAI has been exploring South Bay office options since last summer and spent months deciding between Mountain View and Sunnyvale.
Since launching ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has been on a leasing spree. It now occupies more than 1 million square feet in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, near the Chase Center.
Sources say the company has agreed to sublease more than 200,000 square feet at Dropbox’s former headquarters at 1800 Owens St., but the landlord — KKR — still has to consent to the deal.
ChatGPT also has an outpost in New York and this week established its biggest research hub outside the U.S., in London (opens in new tab).