Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is selling off rented office space at the Hudson Yards complex in New York City. It’s the latest sign of tightening the belts at the Silicon Valley-based tech giant, which recently laid off thousands of employees.
Meta will move out 250,000 square feet of office space at 30 and 55 Hudson Yards, but will keep most of its unfinished 50 Hudson Yards footprint — about 1.2 million square feet — a source familiar with the matter told The Post. told to
Meta has notified its affiliates who are landowners of the buildings of its plans not to renew the leases of Hudson Yards 30 Yards and Hudson Yards 55 Yards at the end of 2024.
Meta told investors last month that it expected the office space consolidation to cost $2 billion.
The company has rented out 30 Hudson Yards and 55 Hudson Yards of office space. This was intended to be a “swing space,” or a temporary office to use before moving to its long-term address at 50 Hudson Yards.
Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton posted on The Wednesday.
The Post has reached out to Related Cos. for comment.
In 2019, Meta, then still known as Facebook, signed a lease to lease over 1.5 million square feet of office space in three towers at Hudson Yards.
Most of the space is at 50 Hudson Yards, and Meta is subleasing part of the footprint, Clayton told The Post, confirming the item first reported by Bloomberg.
The job cuts come shortly after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would cut 11,000 jobs (about 13% of its strong workforce of 87,000) due to severe economic headwinds.
Meta’s stock has fallen more than 65% over the past year. This is his lowest level in six years.
Meta said in its latest earnings call that sales had declined for two consecutive quarters. The company has struggled with declining ad revenue from fierce competition from the emerging social media app TikTok.
The Menlo Park, California company earned $4.4 billion, or $1.64 per share, in the three months ended Sept. 30. That’s down 52% from $9.19 billion, or $3.22 per share, in the year-ago quarter.
Revenue fell 4% from $29.01 billion to $27.71 billion, slightly above analyst expectations of $27.4 billion.
Zuckerberg came under fire from Wall Street after investors became bearish on a multi-billion dollar bet on the company’s Metaverse project.
Before the recent recession, Meta expanded its New York City real estate footprint in anticipation of bringing employees back to the office en masse.
In August 2020, it leased 720,000 sf in the Farley Building in Vornado.
While Meta is shrinking its presence in the Big Apple, its tech rival Google is doubling down on a strategy of expanding its footprint in the region in hopes of attracting talent.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., told Crain’s New York Business that he is “personally bullish long-term on our growth in New York as a company.”
Pichai pays only lip service. Last year, Google announced it would buy the St. John’s Terminal Building on West Houston Street near the Hudson River for a whopping $2.1 billion.
Pichai told Cranes that Google plans to open an office there by the middle of next year.
Google is also developing two sites in the Hudson Square section of Manhattan. All three buildings make up a campus with a total of 1.7 million square feet.
Earlier this year, Google announced a new campus at Pier 57 that includes office space in three buildings.
As of September last year, Google employed 12,000 people in the city. The company aims to increase its workforce by 2,000 over the next few years, he said.