Robotics occupiers expand rapidly

Bay Area robotics companies now control about 7.6 million square feet across more than 220 leases, a sharp expansion from less than 500,000 square feet in 2020. (therealdeal.com) The new tally comes from JLL data published on April 15, 2026, and JLL projects as much as 1.5 million square feet of additional robotics leasing in 2026 alone. Alexander Quinn, JLL’s senior director of Northern California research, told The Real Deal the new wave involves robots “that want to be intelligent” and need to be near Bay Area artificial intelligence firms. (therealdeal.com) (jll.com) A robotics occupier is not just a software startup with desks. These companies need offices for engineers, flex space for testing, and industrial buildings where they can assemble machines, run pilots, and move parts and finished robots. (therealdeal.com) (jll.com) That helps explain why the leasing boom is showing up in a region still working through high office vacancy after the pandemic. In San Francisco, JLL said office demand was still improving in the first quarter of 2026, while industrial landlords across the Bay Area were also competing in a softer market with rising vacancy in some submarkets. (jll.com) (kidder.com) The current robotics push is tied closely to the broader artificial intelligence build-out in Northern California. The Real Deal reported that AI has become the main accelerant for robotics leasing, and CBRE said in May 2025 that AI-related companies had already leased more than 5 million square feet in San Francisco. (therealdeal.com) (cbre.com) The biggest lease highlighted so far this year is Tesla’s deal for 276,000 square feet of flex office space near its Fremont factory for Optimus robot development. The Real Deal said that transaction is the largest Bay Area robotics lease of 2026 to date. (therealdeal.com) Other companies are taking smaller but still specialized footprints. Figure AI leased a 98,700-square-foot industrial flex building at 3960 North First Street in San Jose in March 2025, nearly quadrupling its previous base in Sunnyvale. (therealdeal.com) The mix of tenants is wider than humanoid robot makers. JLL’s Bay Area count also includes drone and robotics firms, and companies such as Redwood City-based Dexterity and San Francisco-based warehouse automation startup Nimble are building systems for logistics and fulfillment, not consumer gadgets. (theregistrysf.com) (beckhoff.com) (nimble.ai) The timing also reflects a funding and product cycle. The Robot Report’s 2026 industry outlook said 2025 brought record funding rounds for some robotics companies even as other firms struggled, with humanoid robots drawing particular attention from investors and manufacturers. (therobotreport.com) For Bay Area landlords, the appeal is straightforward: robotics tenants take real space, not just cloud capacity. For robotics companies, the region still offers the same thing Quinn pointed to — proximity to the engineers and AI talent needed to turn software models into machines on a factory floor. (therealdeal.com)