Nearly a year after subleasing half of Uber’s shiny glass headquarters in Mission Bay, OpenAI has vacated its previous, humbler digs in the Mission,

AI firms are SF’s most desired tenants. Here’s how much office space they’re gobbling up

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2024-08-29 18:30:07

Nearly a year after subleasing half of Uber’s shiny glass headquarters in Mission Bay, OpenAI has vacated its previous, humbler digs in the Mission, where it occupied a three-story, century-old, restored trunk factory.

Known as the Pioneer Building, the 37,104-square-foot property at 2181 Folsom St. also incubated the payment software unicorn Stripe before it migrated to a larger SoMa office, then decamped from the city altogether in 2019.

That sort of incremental growth cycle — a kind of startup puberty — is one San Francisco landlords and property owners are hoping plays out again with artificial intelligence firms as the city remains mired in the steepest commercial real estate downturn in recent memory.

Since Big Tech has slashed its office presence in the city by nearly half, enthusiasm has shifted to the pool of tenants in the emerging AI space, which is developing revolutionary products, drawing billions in VC dollars, and growing both headcount and office-space requirements.

According to research from real estate firm JLL, which represented the landlord in OpenAI’s sublease of Uber’s HQ, AI companies have leased more than 1.7 million square feet of office space since ChatGPT was released in late 2022 — a sharp increase after years of quiet, incremental growth.