Google reportedly planning a new Silicon Valley campus with a hardware center

Google plans another campus in Silicon Valley which will include a new center for some of its hardware products, CNBC reported. Google has been buying up land in northern San Jose, California, spending more than $389 million on what preliminary plans show will include a research and development center, according to CNBC.

The campus, which it calls Midpoint, will be located between Google’s current Mountain View headquarters and its mixed-use campus in San Jose. Midpoint will have five office buildings connected by a pedestrian bridge, and will be adjacent to three industrial buildings that planning documents show will serve as a hub for its hardware division, including its Nest smart home products. The documents also show that Google has been planning the Midpoint site since 2018, CNBC reported.

Google didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment Saturday, but a campus that has more space dedicated to hardware makes sense, given what executives have said recently. The company’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh has said Google is ready to start grabbing market share in the hardware space. As The Verge’s Dieter Bohn noted after a recent visit to Mountain View for a peek at the Pixel 6, Google’s flagship phone has tiny market share compared to Apple and Samsung.