Fortinet has now spent more than $300 million in Silicon Valley property shopping spree
Fortinet has bought a big Silicon Valley tech campus in a deal that extends the cybersecurity tech company’s South Bay shopping spree past the $300 million mark, public records show.
Sunnyvale-based Fortinet paid $192 million to buy a large campus that consists of multiple office and research buildings at and near 3833 Kifer Road in Santa Clara.
Texas Instruments, one of the big names in the semiconductor industry, sold the campus to Fortinet in an all-cash deal, according to documents filed on Jan. 26 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office.
This deal appears — by far — to be the largest single amount that Fortinet has paid as part of the tech company’s remarkable expansion of its Silicon Valley footprint, which has been growing both in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.
The company made it clear that this expanding footprint in the region underscores its decades-long commitment to the Bay Area.
“Fortinet is immensely proud to call the Bay Area home for over 20 years,” Fortinet stated through an email from the company’s communications staff.
So far, Fortinet has paid $326.7 million for many properties in Santa Clara County as part of a buying binge that began more than a decade ago in 2012.
The slew of Sunnyvale properties that Fortinet has been purchasing over the past decade are mostly unassuming industrial or commercial sites.
Along the way, Fortinet built and opened a new headquarters building at 909 Kifer Road in Sunnyvale. The new headquarters is on a site that Fortinet purchased during its real estate buying efforts.
The company has also been assembling properties in Union City in a fashion that could enable Fortinet to create an East Bay outpost.
The South Bay deal appears to mark the first time that Fortinet has bought a property in Santa Clara. The Texas Instruments site, however, is only a half mile from the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters on Kifer Road.
Texas Instruments sold the Santa Clara campus after the chip titan’s deal to lease about 200,000 square feet of office space at 4555 Great America Parkway, also in Santa Clara.
The Santa Clara campus that Fortinet bought accommodates some modestly sized office and research buildings.
What Fortinet might be after, however, is the land beneath the buildings. The site totals about 27 acres, according to documents on file with the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office.
With a parcel of this size, and using modern density estimates, it could be possible for Fortinet to bulldoze the existing buildings and construct new office and research spaces.
Under some methods to calculate allowable building densities, it might be possible to construct as much as 800,000 square feet of space on a 27-acre site in the Bay Area. That’s enough office space to accommodate 4,000 workers.
The potential expansion efforts arrive at a time when Fortinet’s profits and sales are soaring.
Over the one-year period that ended in September 2023, Fortinet earned $1.15 billion on revenue of $5.17 billion. In the calendar year 2022, Fortinet earned $857 million on revenue of $4.42 billion.
“Fortinet is committed to its roots in the Bay Area and contributes to jobs and growth in the surrounding community,” the company stated in the email.
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