A founder posted on r/SaaS this week about Campus Madrid closing, calling it one of the last Google for Startups locations before the whole thing got shut down globally.
The post has that particular flavour of grief you get when a free perk disappears: genuine, a bit surprised at how much it's missed, and slightly overstating the scale of what's actually happening.
Because it isn't a global shutdown.
Not yet, anyway. But something is definitely happening, and it's worth pulling apart.
Campus Madrid closed its doors for good on 31 December 2025, ten years after it opened.
Google's own line is that the value was never really the building, it was the people in it, and that they're now putting the money into global AI acceleration programmes instead: things like the Gemini Kit, API Sprints, a Founders Forum. Seoul followed in March 2026, though officially only "paused."
London, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Warsaw are still listed as open on Google's own site as I write this. So what you've actually got is a rolling wind-down, city by city, not a single announcement with a firm end date attached.
Why now, though
A few things are probably true at once. The first is the obvious one: physical space is expensive and hard to measure. A desk in a five-storey Madrid building has a cost you can put a number on.
The return on it, mentoring hours, connections made, the vague hum of "founder energy" the Reddit post describes, is much harder to defend in a budget meeting, especially inside a company under real pressure to show AI investment paying off everywhere else.
The second is that Google's own priorities have shifted hard toward AI-first, at-scale programmes. A Gemini Sprint can reach thousands of founders in a hundred countries at once. A Campus can hold maybe a hundred people in one city. If you're optimising for reach and for tying founders into your AI tooling early, the physical building is the less efficient bet by a country mile.
And the third is what happens after. In Madrid, a local operator called Mad Tech Campus stepped into the gap within a month and is already nearly full. That's the actual story here, maybe more than the Google decision itself: when a Big Tech company pulls back from in-person infrastructure, the vacuum gets filled fast by people who were never trying to compete with Google's budget, just its footprint. Founders didn't need the search giant's logo on the wall.
They needed the room, the coffee, and other people stuck on the same problems as them.
So no, Google hasn't shut this down everywhere. But if you're in one of the remaining cities, I wouldn't bank on it lasting. And if you're not, keep an eye on who moves into the space Google leaves behind.
That's usually where the more interesting founder community ends up living anyway.
