Dive Brief:

• Google plans to invest $7 billion in offices and data centers across 19 states this year, while creating up to 10,000 new full-time jobs.
• In a blog post last week, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai detailed plans for building or expanding offices and data centers across the country, while moving into three new locations in Texas, North Carolina and Minnesota.   
• “Not only will these investments enable us to create new opportunities in the places where we operate; they’ll also make it possible to provide products and services that help boost economic recovery,” Pichai wrote.

Dive Insight:

The announcement brings a much-needed boost of good news to the office construction market, one of the hardest hit building sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Coming together in person to collaborate and build community is core to Google’s culture, and it will be an important part of our future,” Pichai wrote. “So we continue to make significant investments in our offices around the country, as well as our home state of California, where we will be investing over $1 billion this year.”

Unlike other tech firms, such as Facebook and Twitter, Pichai told employees in December the firm wasn’t planning on a permanent remote work environment.

Instead, he extended the company’s work-from-home schedule until September 2021, while setting forth expectations that employees live within a “commutable distance” to their assigned offices, where they should anticipate reporting in person at least three days a week.  

In addition to California, where its now-under-construction Bay View campus is expected to open later this year in Mountain View, Pichai called out the following specific investments across the country:

South: The firm will increase its investment at its South Carolina data center, establish its newest cloud engineering site in Durham, North Carolina, and open the first U.S. Google Operations Center in Southaven, Mississippi.

In Virginia, the firm plans to open a new office building in Reston, while expanding its existing data center in Loudoun County.

In Texas, the firm’s Midlothian data center is now operational. It will open a Houston office, and will continue to invest in its existing campus in Austin.

Midwest: Google opened a new office in Rochester, Minnesota earlier this year, and its data centers in New Albany, Ohio, and Papillion, Nebraska, are now operational, with an additional Nebraska investment forthcoming.

In Michigan, the tech giant plans to make improvements in its Detroit and Ann Arbor offices, as it will to those at 210 North Carpenter space in Chicago, as well.

East: In 2018, Google committed to doubling its New York workforce by 2028, and it said it would continue building out its campus presence there to meet that goal, as work continues on its Google Hudson Square project in New York City.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh are targeted for additional office investments, while Washington, D.C., is slated to see an increase in its workforce.

Central and West: The company will continue work on its new Kirkland Urban campus in Washington state, and further invest in its Seattle campus.

It said it is also growing in Boulder, Colorado, and will open a new office in Portland, Oregon, in 2021.

In Nevada, its Henderson data center is now operational. It plans to further expand it, along with its Storey County data center, later this year.