Ron Amadeo / Google Maps

Ron Amadeo / Google Maps

Google

Google

Google

Google

Google

Google

Google

Google and LinkedIn have worked out a deal that will see the Mountain View neighbors swap a few million square feet of real estate. Silicon Valley Business Journal reported the deal, which should help alleviate both companies' space problems and give Google room to develop its futuristic "canopy" campus.

Google will receive all of LinkedIn's existing Mountain View territory, which consists of LinkedIn's 370,000-square-feet headquarters and almost eight acres of land LinkedIn had planned on turning into office space. LinkedIn will move a few miles across town into four office buildings currently owned by Google that come out to about 750,000 square feet of office space. LinkedIn instantly gets to double its office space while avoiding a costly "five- to six-year" construction project, and Google gets the space and building rights it needs to build its crazy indoor/outdoor spiderweb canopy utopia.

For a very rough idea of what is going on, the above gallery shows the current territory layout at Google and LinkedIn headquarters. (Google might actually own more area than this, we just based this off of "buildings that start with 'Google'" on Google Maps, which might be incomplete). In the first picture, LinkedIn's headquarters is the blue area in the top right, while the bottom blue area is a shopping center LinkedIn wanted to turn into office space. All of that space is now going to Google. In the second picture, you can see the Google office buildings LinkedIn is moving to, just a few miles away.

Google owns a huge chunk of land in Mountain View with many office buildings, but the buildings have all been hand-me-downs. In February 2015, Google announced plans to renovate its campus with an ambitious design featuring a large membrane covering configurable activity space. To expand, both LinkedIn and Google needed to compete for Mountain View's 2.2 million square feet of available commercial square footage. The city, fearing it would become an all-Google town, awarded the majority of the construction rights—1.4 million square feet—to LinkedIn, leaving Google with nowhere to build its new headquarters.

With the real estate swap, those construction rights go to Google, so the company now has all the space it asked for. There are still lots of problems Google will have to deal with when it comes to its new complex, but it seems the biggest one has been solved.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo / Google Maps