In San Francisco this year, AI firms have leased about a million square feet of space, about half again as much as last year. One start-up took over Slack’s former 230,000 sf headquarters. As this article points out, “This type of work is best done with small teams in person. That’s how breakthroughs happen when something highly technical or scientific has a clustering of people trying to figure it out together.”
People are moving back from resort towns like Bend because they don’t want to miss out on the start-up action. One response from companies who have a lot of people coming in who haven’t yet settled there: work rooms that look like hotel rooms, complete with bathrooms, showers, and fresh towels. These are 24-hour workspaces in urban centers where the specialists of a new industry are gathering face to face and working around the clock. That’s a much different proposition than the lonely live/work lofts now programmed into so many suburban town centers.
The Bloomberg article: