Western Digital Corp., Orange County’s largest publicly traded technology company by market value, has added another sizable chunk of space to its headquarters at the Park Place office campus in Irvine.
The public company, which is the world’s largest hard disk drive maker, recently inked a deal to expand the Park Place headquarters by 60,000 square feet. That’s roughly equivalent to three floors at one of the area’s office towers.
The new deal, for Park Place’s 3355 Michelson office, means that Western Digital now leases about 520,000 square feet at Park Place, the sprawling, futuristic-looking office complex just off the San Diego (405) Freeway that’s owned by Irvine-based LBA Realty.
Terms of the latest lease, one of the larger office expansions by a local company this year, weren’t disclosed.
Western Digital was represented in the lease by Studley Inc.’s Royce Sharf, Kelly Givens and Mike Props. Orion Property Partners and Cushman & Wakefield handle leasing for LBA Realty at Park Place.
The extra space is expected to handle future growth for Western Digital, which has been on a big expansion push over the past few years.
The company relocated its headquarters from Lake Forest to Park Place in 2010 when it was valued at about $8 billion, taking over 365,000 square feet at the office campus.
Western Digital added an additional 104,000 square feet there in 2011 when it was valued at about $6.9 billion.
The company, since that expansion, has made a series of acquisitions that consolidated its position in the disk drive market and drove its stock to record highs.
Last year it closed on the $4.3 billion buy of San Jose-based competitor Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Ltd., one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of Orange County’s tech sector.
In the past six months, Western Digital bought a trio of solid-state drive makers, whose products use chips instead of the spinning disks in hard disk drives to store data.
It paid $340 million for Santa Ana-based sTec Inc. in a deal that closed in September and $685 million for Milpitas-based Virident Systems Inc. in an October deal. In July it closed on the buy of Lincoln, Mass.-based VeloBit Inc. on undisclosed terms.
Solid-state drives are in high demand as companies look to the cloud to store data and push streaming content from servers to electronic devices.
The company is now worth about $16.8 billion, and its shares have nearly doubled from a year ago. It recently passed Irvine-based Broadcom Corp. in market value, the first time in more than a decade that the chipmaker hasn’t been Orange County’s biggest technology company by market value.
Broadcom, which now has a market value of about $15 billion, still can lay claim to being OC’s largest technology company based on the amount of local office space it occupies. It leases more than 900,000 square feet at University Research Center and is exploring several sites in the area for a larger campus.
LBA Leasing
Western Digital now leases the bulk of the space in Park Place’s two four-story Atrium buildings, at 3353 and 3355 Michelson Drive, thanks to the latest expansion.
The offices house its corporate functions, including executive, legal, sales, marketing and operations teams. They also include drive and drive parts testing space, along with product development labs.
The company is believed to have about 1,600 workers in Irvine.
The new lease adds to a growing list of deals LBA has signed at Park Place since it bought the 105-acre office and retail campus in a series of transactions in 2009 and 2010.
Last year, St. Joseph Health signed a nearly 200,000-square-foot lease there that was one of the largest office deals of the year. This year, healthcare software company Kareo Inc. and online home design company Houzz Inc. were among the larger companies that signed Park Place leases, and LA Fitness recently opened a new flagship gym at the campus.
About 120,000 square feet of office space remains available for lease at LBA’s buildings at Park Place, which total about 1.6 million square feet.
