Facebook parent company Meta just revealed plans to expand its already sizable presence here in Austin. The social media giant confirmed to Built In on Monday that it has leased half of Sixth and Guadalupe — a new 66-story building that will reportedly be the tallest skyscraper in the city once it is complete in 2023.
A company spokesperson told Built In via email that the new space will measure 589,000 square feet, which is intended to accommodate the more than 400 new employees it plans to hire in the coming months.
“We first came to Austin over 10 years ago with just seven employees, now over 2,000 of us are proud to call Austin home,” Katherine Shappley, the head of Meta’s local office and VP for commerce customer success, said in a statement shared with Built In. “We’re committed to Austin and look forward to growing here together.”
Meta has several offices here in Austin, the most recent of which was opened back in 2019. While it is not clear exactly what kind of work will be done at this new office, the company spokesperson said the new positions include everything from marketing and human resources to augmented and virtual reality — an area the company has been especially interested in lately (most recently for home fitness).
Of course, Meta is not the only company to open a new office in the Lone Star State lately, despite the uncertainties of the ongoing pandemic. Texas, especially Austin, has become a hot-bed for tech companies around the world. And many of them have either expanded their presence here or relocated their headquarters altogether in just the last year or so, including major players like Wayfair, Tesla, and Cloudflare. In fact, at 125,000 square feet, Cloudflare's new office lease was the largest in Austin since the start of the pandemic when it was announced in August.
Now, this latest news means Meta’s lease grabs that honor, and becomes the second largest lease in the city’s history behind Google’s Block 185 office, which was announced in 2019.
