After demolishing swaths of San Jose, Google puts campus project on hold

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  Google's rendering of "The Meander," which will be "a central social gathering place with shops and local food." I assume there are office buildings in there somewhere.

For a while, Google has planned to build a new 80-acre mega campus that would take over a large chunk of downtown San Jose, California. If you expressed doubt that the modern-day shutdown-happy Google could commit to the "10-to-30-year" timeline for the construction project, congratulations! CNBC's Jennifer Elias reports that Google has put the idea "on pause" after just two years of construction.

Google got approval to start the project in 2021. The plan was to build an area twice as large as Google's recently finished "Bay View" headquarters, which is about 14 miles down the road. The 80-acre "mixed-use neighborhood" would have had 7.3 million square feet of office space, 4,000 housing units, 15 acres of "parks, plazas, and green space," and 500,000 square feet dedicated to "retail, cultural, arts, education, hotels and more." The project, called "Downtown West," had no estimated construction budget when it was announced, but some estimates said the finished work could be valued at $19 billion.

That was two years ago, though, and now Google is in the era of cost-cutting and earning Wall Street's approval, so it sounds like Google has shifted its priorities again. CNBC's report says that the project is now "on hold," and sources tell Elias that Google "doesn’t have plans to revive the project in the near future." Citing "internal correspondence," the report also says Google removed construction updates from the project's website last month.

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