Big expansion: Adobe’s new downtown San Jose office tower would rise 18 stories

SAN JOSE — Adobe Systems, in a move that will bring thousands of additional employees of the tech giant into downtown San Jose, filed plans Thursday with city officials for a striking new office tower next to its existing three-building headquarters campus.

Potentially, 3,000 Adobe employees could work at the gleaming office building, which is being called the North Tower and would sprout at a cleared-out lot on the north side of the company’s current office complex. The building would be as much as 650,000 square feet in size, planning documents show.

“As the first technology company to build offices in downtown San Jose, we’re excited to be a part of the city’s expanding skyline,” said Jonathan Francom, Adobe’s vice president for employee workplace solutions.

San Jose-based Adobe on Thursday submitted an update for an already fully approved development that provides specifics about the company’s plans for the tower. The development site is at 333 W. San Fernando St., on the east side of Highway 87.

“The building will be 18 stories tall with a bridge that will connect the new tower to the company’s existing headquarters,” Francom said in comments emailed to this news organization.

During an interview in February, Scott Ekman, Adobe’s senior director of global real estate, estimated that construction on the tower could begin sometime in 2019. He told a meeting of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group that Adobe intends to hire hundreds of people a year to work in downtown San Jose.

Adobe moved its head offices to downtown San Jose in 1996.

“This new tower builds on the investment we made 20 years ago to the city of San Jose,” Francom said.

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It’s also a huge increase in Adobe’s presence in downtown San Jose. According to estimates from the company in February, Adobe at the time employed roughly 3,500 workers in downtown San Jose and another 1,500 in San Francisco. In effect, Adobe uses Caltrain as a shuttle between its two Bay Area employment hubs.

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Big credit union plans new downtown San Jose branch “We’re excited that we’ll have capacity for an additional 3,000 employees and to further contribute to San Jose’s continued urban development,” Francom said.

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