Google announced plans to invest millions in its Illinois operations, including upgrades to its two Chicago offices in Fulton Market.
Google said Thursday that it is making a $25 million investment in the state of Illinois and plans to hire locally as Chicago's economy prepares for recovery post-Covid. Google plans to add two additional floors, totaling 58,000 square feet, at its 210 N. Carpenter st. office, which houses Google's growing Cloud team. Google opened that office in 2019, its second in the Fulton Market neighborhood.
The two new floors will each have access to an outdoor balcony, with views looking east toward the city and west toward the United Center, Google said.
Google said it will make additional space upgrades at 210 N. Carpenter, as well as improvements to its other Chicago office building at 320 N. Morgan St. Google currently occupies 525,000 square feet across both buildings. It has more than 1,400 employees statewide.
Google also plans to add additional jobs in Chicago as part of a previously announced plan to add 10,000 jobs across its offices in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and New York by 2025. The company said it will hire 1,000 new roles in those cities this year. Google declined to announce specific hiring numbers for Chicago.
The company also said it's committed to improving its employee diversity. Google said it's boosting representation of underrepresented groups at senior levels by 30% by 2025, and it expects to more than double the number of Black employees at all other levels by 2025.
Google announced Thursday that 2020 was the company’s largest year ever for hiring Black and Latinx workers in the U.S.
“We’ve been proud to call Chicago home for more than 20 years and we want to be able to look back 20 years from now and see that we’ve had even more impact,” Karen Sauder, VP and head of Google's Chicago office, said in a statement. “In 2021, we’re prioritizing diversity in hiring and looking for the ways we can support more economic equality in our city through new jobs, investments in the community, and other programs we’re offering small businesses.”
Google first opened an office in Chicago in 2000, which housed a small sales team. It moved into its first Fulton Market office in 2015.
