Facebook to move into former Sun Microsystems campus

Facebook Inc. is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto to the nearby former home of Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park.

David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, announced the move Tuesday in a news conference at the 57-acre Menlo Park property.

Facebook signed a 15-year lease for the Menlo Park campus with the option to buy it in five years, according to a company spokeswoman who asked that she not be named because she was not authorized to speak on the details of the lease.

The world’s most popular social media website will start moving employees to the new campus in June or July and workers will probably continue to trickle into the new offices through late 2011 or early 2012. Facebook’s leases in Palo Alto last through 2013, according to a company statement.

The new campus is about six miles from the two Palo Alto locations that make up Facebook’s current headquarters.

The Menlo Park complex is made up of 11 buildings with about 1 million square feet of office space and 3,700 parking spaces. Facebook currently has more than 2,000 employees, with about 1,400 of them in Palo Alto, and is expected to expand its workforce.

The Menlo Park complex was built from 1993 to 1995 and was Sun’s headquarters until it was purchased by Oracle Corp. in January 2010.

Facebook also bought a nearby 22-acre tract of land that is connected to its soon-to-be headquarters by a tunnel under the Bayfront Expressway. The social networking giant made that purchase in preparation for a possible future expansion of the Menlo Park headquarters, the company said in a statement.

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