By Urvaksh Karkaria – Staff Writer, Atlanta Business Chronicle Updated Feb 14, 2018, 10:03pm EST Co-working giant WeWork’s voracious appetite for Atlanta marketshare shows no sign of being satiated. The New York-based “unicorn” is expected to occupy 50,000 square feet at Coda, a high-profile office tower rising in the shadow of Tech Square, according to a source. A lease could be signed by month's end, the source said. A WeWork spokeswoman declined comment late Wednesday. Coda is a $400 million mixed-use development under construction at Tech Square, an eight-block development bustling with startups, tech incubators, venture firms and students. Georgia Tech will serve as the anchor tenant for the 770,000-square-foot Coda, occupying about half of the office and center. The remaining space will be available for corporations and Georgia Tech research partners. WeWork, valued at more than $20 billion and backed by SoftBank Group, is in a land-grab battle in Atlanta and other cities. In November, Atlanta Business Chronicle first reported WeWork’s plans to lease two floors — nearly 50,000 square feet — at Terminus 100. The company also has a 70,000 square-foot location in Buckhead's Tower Place and more than 75,000 square feet of space in Midtown’s Colony Square and 1372 Peachtree. Atlanta’s robust ecosystem of startups and Fortune 1000 companies, coupled with its deep talent pool, make the city an attractive market for shared-space providers, such as WeWork, Industrious, Roam, Serendipity Labs and Office Evolution. Atlanta is the fifth largest co-working market in the United States behind Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, according to real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield. In Atlanta, there was 230,000 square feet of new coworking space in 2017, which represented 18 percent of overall absorption. Atlanta is expected to surpass 1 million square feet of co-working space in 2018. In Atlanta and elsewhere, companies, such as Microsoft, use co-working offices as swing space, while others use it as a permanent regional office. For the co-working industry, the next step is a managed-service model, where providers manage office spaces for enterprise companies and create a workplace culture for their millennial workforce. These locations have the same energy and offerings as a third party co-working space, but are provided for just one company’s workforce. Co-working spaces are mushrooming nationwide as demographics and working habits change. Mobile technology has freed Americans from the confines of cubicles and many are flocking to “design-focused” co-working spaces. Tenants — which include freelancers, two- to four-employee startups and established companies — sign month-to-month leases that offer the flexibility to take more space as they grow, or walk away in case they don’t. The diverse mix of people and companies in a concentrated space sets the stage for the serendipitous interaction critical to sparking new ideas and partnerships. Co-working hubs also serve as places for corporations to host off-site meetings and tap into startup culture.