AT&T is closing the last of its offices in Redmond, Washington, departing a 77,000 square-foot location in Redmond Town Center. The location went up for lease in May 2024, allowing it to become available for a new tenant in February 2025. Redmond Town Center was once home to 3 separate AT&T buildings, with AT&T subleasing a 2nd 137,000 square-foot building out to Amazon in 2020 and having departed its 3rd building in 2017, for employee consolidations.
This marks the end of the footprint of what used to be AT&T Wireless, which used to be headquartered in the Seattle area. AT&T spun off from the baby bells breakup in 1984. AT&T purchased McCaw Cellular for its nationwide wireless footprint, which was located in Kirkland, Redmond and Seattle in 1994. In 2000, the merger eventually led to a stand-alone and publicly traded company, AT&T Wireless. AT&T Wireless was managed from the Seattle area from 2000-2004. In 2004, AT&T Wireless was purchased by Cingular. Cingular was purchased by SBC in 2005 and then rebranded as AT&T Mobility in 2006. AT&T Wireless offices in its Seattle Eastlake location, which were located near Amazon's South Lake Union HQ, were closed. The locations in Kirkland were closed as well. Redmond continued to primarily be used for management and IT staff while several large office buildings in Bothell Washington were used for technical and customer service staff. AT&T also had significant offices in Portland, Oregon as well as smaller offices in Spokane and Yakima, Washington. AT&T HQ moved to Atlanta under Cingular and now is based in Dallas under AT&T Mobility.
With the closure of Redmond, AT&T has now closed the last of its corporate and management office space in the Pacific Northwest. 2 years ago, AT&T CEO John Stankey said in an interview with Bloomberg that AT&T had corporate offices in all 50 states and was consolidating office space down to 9 locations. With more AT&T office space having closed in St Louis in 2017 and 2024 and the relocation of St Louis employees in 2024, AT&T might want to have an even smaller corporate office footprint, perhaps only based in Atlanta and Dallas.
While the wireless industry has not seen the growth it had 20 years ago, these moves may be significant, as AT&T was an early adopter of remote work, shared and hybrid workspaces many years before the pandemic. The company called employees back to work in 2023, not offering severance packages to employees who could not relocate easily. With the closure of more workspaces, it could mean the wireless industry and large corporations in general are resizing and need less employees. Does it mean that the move from remote work to return to office, might now have made some corporate management realize some positions may no longer be needed at all? The growth of AI, being able to source employees globally and the trend of post pandemic layoffs from big tech companies to the government, could mean more downsizing and office closures will be seen over the next few years.