Dive Brief:

• Google and LinkedIn have agreed to a massive land swap involving 1 million square feet of existing buildings and 2.4 million square feet of development land in Mountain View, CA, and Sunnyvale, CA, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported.
• The agreement, which includes LinkedIn's existing headquarters, gives Google the land it needs to expand in the North Bayshore area of Mountain View, while LinkedIn will now be able to quickly build a corporate campus in other areas of Mountain View and Sunnyvale.
• The two companies have been engaged in a real estate battle for premium development space in the North Bayshore area for some time. Google paid $215.2 million to LinkedIn for the land, and LinkedIn paid $334.1 million to Google for its parcel, according to the Business Journal.

Dive Insight:

As part of the deal, Google gets to continue development on LinkedIn's planned 10-building "Shoreline Commons." That project, according to Palo Alto Online, will serve the thousands of new households expected to move into the area with a hotel, movie theater, retail and restaurants. The new deal, the companies said, also allows them to "streamline" and better plan more than $90 million of city-required transportation and infrastructure projects.

Relations between the companies were fairly icy as recently as October, when the Mountain View City Council gave its approval to LinkedIn to build a new headquarters but denied Google a much-publicized, Bjarke Ingels Group-designed expansion of its existing campus by allowing it only 515,000 square feet to build.

The council said it denied Google's plan because it wanted business diversity, and feared Google's plan would stunt growth in the city. One council member said despite the impressive nature of the 2.5 million-square-foot expansion, the 5,000 housing unit complex was too reminiscent of mining towns from old frontier days.

After that denial, Google moved to build a separate campus, with a tie-in to the original, called "Charleston East," another Bjarke Ingels design. The new 600,000-square-foot building will be able to accommodate 3,000 employees and will feature an opaque, tent-like roof. After Google's announcement of its revised campus plans, the local business community reportedly breathed a huge sigh of relief that there is still building and expansion momentum among the Bay Area’s major tech players.