Google to spend $1 billion on major New York City expansion
Google said Monday it will spend $1 billion on a new New York City campus, allowing the company to double its staff there within a decade.
The new campus, dubbed Google Hudson Square, will consist of 1.7 million square feet of office space in lower Manhattan, Google CFO Ruth Porat said in a blog post. The company employs about 7,000 people in New York.
The announcement follows plans from other tech giants to expand their operations outside their home bases, such as Amazon's new HQ2 headquarters in New York and Virginia. And last week, Apple detailed plans to build a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, as well as open offices in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, California.
Technology companies are expanding in an effort to find more talent, especially as the high cost of living in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs may make it more difficult to recruit people in those locations.
"New York City continues to be a great source of diverse, world-class talent — that's what brought Google to the city in 2000 and that's what keeps us here," Porat wrote. "We will have the capacity to more than double the number of Googlers in New York over the next 10 years."
The company plans to move into two of its new locations in New York, at 315 and 345 Hudson Street, by 2020, and another office at 550 Washington Street in 2022.
"Our investment in New York is a huge part of our commitment to grow and invest in U.S. facilities, offices and jobs," Porat said. "In fact, we're growing faster outside the Bay Area than within it."