Tesla expands in Fremont with new office buildings for more than 1,000 employees

Tesla has been expanding its Fremont factory over the last year to support its increasing vehicle production – especially the new Model 3 production, but the company is also in need of more office space as its Palo Alto headquarters are over occupied.

Now we learn that Tesla has signed a lease and is now renovating 2 office buildings in the region.

San Jose’s Mercury News reported that Tesla has leased 230,000 square feet of office space between two buildings at 6800 Dumbarton Circle and 6900 Dumbarton Circle in Fremont.

One building has 116,000-square-foot of office space, which they estimate could accommodate 580 employees and the other building offer 113,000-square-foot of space, which could house roughly 570 employees.

It’s located near the Dumbarton Bridge between Tesla’s Fremont factory and Tesla’s headquarters, which are the automaker’s two main locations in the Bay Area.

Here we made a map to help visualize the locations:

Construction crews were spotted working on the buildings this week as Tesla is apparently preparing to move staff at the location – though the company didn’t comment on the Mercury News report.

Kelly Kline, Fremont’s economic development director, commented:

“We are aware that Tesla has been in the market for substantial office needs beyond their Palo Alto headquarters. We’re very hopeful that Fremont would be a strong contender for that requirement.”

CEO Elon Musk has publicly commented in the past on plans to have new headquarters for the automaker.

Back in 2015, Tesla was already outgrowing its Palo Alto headquarters and Musk said that it looks like “crap”.

“I think our Tesla headquarters looks like crap. We’re going to spruce things up. Not to sort of Google level. You have to be like making money hand over fist in order to be able to spend money the way that Google does. But we’re going to make our headquarters much nicer and put in a restaurant.”

Musk also commented on his more whimsical plans for the Tesla factory in Fremont:

“Everybody around here has slides in their lobbies. I’m actually wondering about putting in a roller coaster – like a functional  roller coaster at the factory in Fremont. You’d get in, and it would take you around the factory but also up and down. Who else has a roller coaster? I’m thinking about doing that with SpaceX too. That one might be even bigger sine SpaceX has like ten building now. It would probably be really expensive, but I like the idea of it.”

At that point, Tesla had ~14,000 employees and it has since grown to over 33,000 employees. The company has acquired or leased many more buildings throughout the Bay Area, but the Palo Alto headquarters near Stanford and the Fremont factory remained the two main locations. Its acquisition of SolarCity also resulted in a few more locations.