Yahoo Inc. won approval Tuesday night from the Santa Clara City Council's 7-0 vote for the construction of its 3-million-square-foot campus here. City Council members certified the environmental impact report, and have approved the proposed development of 13 structures to be built on 48 acres between Old Ironsides Drive and Patrick Henry Drive for the Sunnyvale-based technology company.

As GlobeSt.com previously reported, the 46-acre campus, which the company acquired the assemblage here back in 2006 from San Francisco-based TMG Partners has been in the entitlement process for about a year and a half.

Yahoo currently owns and leases approximately 1.8 million square feet in Sunnyvale, where it is headquartered, and leases an additional 419,000 square feet on Great America parkway in Santa Clara. Yahoo filed an application for entitlements for the new campus development in nearby Santa Clara a little more than a year and a half ago. The city's planning department began reviewing the draft environmental impact statement late last year.

Yahoo Inc. did not return GlobeSt.com queries for comment, however a Yahoo spokesperson previously told GlobeSt.com that there is no timeline for development or firm plans for how the campus would be utilized. While Yahoo isn't providing any cost estimates either such an undertaking would easily top $1 billion, according to local development sources.

The property is located between Old Ironsides Drive and Patrick Henry Drive off of Tasman Boulevard, next to a light rail station. TMG assembled the contiguous acreage in multiple transactions beginning in 2001. The bulk of the property is a 40-acre former Siemens campus that holds 600,000 square feet of single-story R&D-type buildings. The buildings are "mostly vacant" and house no Yahoo employees, according to the spokesperson.

Yahoo! reportedly evaluated more than 50 Bay Area sites from San Francisco to San Jose. One of the key factors in its search was proximity to its headquarters in Sunnyvale.

At the time Yahoo acquired the property, TMG Partners chief executive Michael Covarrubias told Globest.com that Yahoo would eventually scrape the site and build 2.5 million square feet of office space in multiple mid-rise buildings, which would put it on par with Google's headquarters in nearby Mountain View. Covarrubias said TMG would "work with" Yahoo on securing the entitlements "and hopefully more," referring to the possibility of managing the development side of things as well.