Another tech company won’t host its conference in San Francisco

Google is the latest company to relocate one of its annual conferences out of San Francisco as the downtown area struggles to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

The company’s Google Cloud Next conference will be held in Las Vegas next year at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center instead of at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a Google spokesperson confirmed in an email to SFGATE.

This year’s event was held last week at Moscone for the first time since before the pandemic. Moscone Center previously hosted Google Cloud Next in 2017, 2018 and 2019. 

The company initially booked its 2024 Cloud Next conference for April 16-18 at Moscone Center before canceling the booking in July, Lori Lincoln, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Travel Association, said in an email to SFGATE. SF Travel is a city tourism organization that assists with convention bookings, including bookings at Moscone.

When asked why Google decided to cancel its San Francisco booking, a spokesperson for the company declined to comment. The spokesperson said more information about the upcoming Las Vegas conference, which will be held April 9-11, 2024, will be available “in the coming months.”

In November 2022, Red Hat, a software company and subsidiary of IBM, canceled its bookings for the next two years at Moscone, SFGATE previously reported. Red Hat rebooked its conferences for Denver in 2024, and Orlando in 2025. 

Meta canceled its booking in February for next year’s Meta Business Group Summit, which was set to occur in May 2024. The event was fully canceled after the company failed to replace it with a different event. 

Adding to the onslaught, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told the San Francisco Chronicle last week that the annual Dreamforce conference, one of the largest conferences in the city, may not occur in San Francisco after this year. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)

The billionaire CEO said if this year’s Dreamforce is “impacted by the current situation of homelessness and drug use,” then it may be the last year the event is hosted in San Francisco, SFGATE previously reported. The event is scheduled to hit downtown later this month.

After the 2022 Dreamforce, Benioff wrote on social media that the conference had attracted 40,000 attendees and generated $40 million for the “downtown economy.” He noted that there were “zero safety incidents reported” and added, “Everyone commented on the beauty of our city.” 

These annual tech conferences have an outsize impact on the tourism industry in San Francisco, particularly given they tend to be located in the downtown area. The previously scheduled 2024 and 2025 Red Hat conferences were estimated to produce 40,000 hotel stays in total, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The 2024 Meta Business Group Summit was estimated to generate more than 16,254 hotel stays before it was canceled, the outlet said. 

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s office said in an emailed statement to SFGATE that “city officials are having conversations with Google leadership to bring the Google Cloud Next conference back to San Francisco for future years.” 

Sep 5, 2023