SAN JOSE — Google appears to be taking fresh steps towards what could be a new campus for the search giant in north San Jose, where the company spent nearly $272 million buying five buildings during 2018.

In a huge industrial building that Google bought, the search giant intends to place some operations of its Google Hardware unit — formerly known as Nest — according to a planning permit application on file with the city of San Jose.

Mountain View-based Google has confirmed the plans for the building. The brand-new industrial building is at 5093 Disk Drive and is about 168,000 square feet in size, according to a listing on Loopnet.

“At this time we plan for our Hardware team to use the building,” Google said in an email to this news organization regarding the application and the occupancy for the building.

This building is one of three big and new industrial buildings that Google bought in January 2018, paying $117.3 million. All three buildings are on Disk Drive in north San Jose, just north of State Route 237.

In October 2018, Google paid $154.5 million for two big office buildings on North First Street. The 4400 N. First St. office building is empty and the 4300 N. First St. building is leased to Harmonic, although that lease expires in 2020.

“Google is definitely a company that has a lot of irons in the fire,” said David Vanoncini, a managing partner with the San Jose office of Kidder Mathews, a commercial realty brokerage. “They seem to be working on projects in almost every type of business you can imagine.”

Although not directly connected, the clusters of office and industrial buildings are about a two-minute drive, or a brisk walk, from each other, when traveling along Disk Drive, which links the five buildings. Some smaller parcels and buildings are situated in-between. Were Google to purchase the properties adjacent to what it already owns, it would control a huge and contiguous area.

Google doesn’t intend to immediately move into the Disk Drive building where the interior construction is being planned.

“We won’t begin use until the end of this year at the earliest,” Google said in the email.

Because all five buildings are north of 237, they are actually fairly close to sections of Sunnyvale and Mountain View where Google has been busy buying dozens of properties and launching construction in some cases. They also are not all that far from the company’s Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View.

The three office buildings total 377,000 square feet, enough room for 1,800 to 2,000 employees of Google or its owner, Alphabet. The industrial buildings total 563,000 square feet.

In downtown San Jose, near the Diridon train station, Google plans a development where 25,000 people could work, including 15,000 to 20,000 of the search giant’s employees, in a transit-oriented community of office buildings, homes, hotels, shops, restaurants and open spaces.

“The fact that Google is broadening out into San Jose, along with the development in downtown San Jose that they are considering, all of this is great for the region as far as employment goes,” Vanoncini said.