Technology History | 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway — Google Moved Into the Buildings SGI Left Behind

Silicon Graphics built this campus for itself, and then had to leave it.

Four core buildings of roughly 500,000 square feet went up on Amphitheatre Parkway in the mid-1990s for a company that then sat at the centre of computer graphics.

By 2003 the graphics business had commoditised, SGI's revenue was falling, and the space was surplus. Google, scattered across offices in Palo Alto, took a lease on part of the campus that year and moved in; SGI's last staff were out by the middle of 2004.

The name arrived with the tenants — Googleplex, a play on googolplex, the number written as one followed by a googol of zeros.

Ownership took three more years, and it did not come from SGI.

The property had been sold years earlier to real-estate investors, so when Google paid US$319 million in June 2006 the sellers were commercial landlords, and the transaction still needed bankruptcy-court approval because SGI, by then in Chapter 11, retained contractual interests in the site.

The land underneath belongs to the city. Google pays Mountain View for ground leases, US$315,000 a month at the time of the purchase, with annual increases written into the terms.

That municipal thread explains the only part of the campus a visitor can actually use. Charleston Park, five acres in the middle of the 26-acre site, is a public city park, and public trails run from here toward Shoreline Park and the Bay Trail.

The buildings themselves are closed. The lobby with its live projection of search queries, the volleyball courts and the coloured bikes are for employees and their guests, and security will turn back anyone else at the door.

For a Google site that is open, the company's Visitor Experience at Gradient Canopy on North Shoreline Boulevard opened in 2024, and holds one of the three IEEE Milestone plaques for PageRank.

The building in the photograph is number 43, one of the originals SGI put up.

Sources: contemporary AP and CNET reporting on the June 2006 purchase; Pacific Coast Architecture Database; City of Mountain View ground-lease terms as reported at the time; IEEE Milestone documentation. Cover photo: Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.