Prior to like 2022, Google was growing at a ridiculous pace. Prior to 2020, almost all workers were in office. Sergey Brin has previously said that he'd like Go

Prior to like 2022, Google was growing at a ridiculous pace. Prior to 2020, almost all workers were in office. Sergey Brin has previously said that he'd like Google to have 1,000,000 employees someday. It takes a lot of time to acquire office space and then make it available for workers. So Google had a lot of office space growth in the pipe for future growth. Google also makes absolute shitloads of money and, until recently, didn't have a strong focus on reducing costs. "Let's keep that around for the future" made a lot more sense in 2021. Today, Google has much more flat growth, is pushing its growth to lower cost regions, has a much tighter focus on reducing costs, and has a significant portion of its workers never coming into the office. Suddenly, a ton of this office space is just an expense that can be cut.