California tech giant Google is investing $13 billion into expanding across the U.S. this year, some of which is concentrated in the Midwest.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Wednesday in a company blog post that the tech company will expand its existing Madison and Chicago offices, and open new data centers in Nebraska and New Albany, Ohio, a town right outside of Columbus.
Nationally, the expansion will put Google in 24 out of 50 states, Pichai said. Besides the Midwest, Google is also growing in New York, Southern California, Nevada, Virginia and Georgia.
“Our expansion across the U.S. has been crucial to finding great new talent, improving the services that people use every day, and investing in our business,” Pichai wrote in the blog post. “These new investments will give us the capacity to hire tens of thousands of employees, and enable the creation of more than 10,000 new construction jobs … 2019 marks the second year in a row we’ll be growing faster outside of the Bay Area than in it.”
In Chicago, Google is reportedly planning to add more than 100,000 square feet of office space in the city’s Fulton Market district, the neighborhood home to Google’s existing Chicago headquarters, according to The Chicago Tribune.
In Madison, Pichai said Google is slated to move its current workforce into a larger space within the next few months to accommodate new employees it plans to hire. Google has reportedly leased 30,000 square feet of office space in the new Gebhardt Building in Madison, a space that can accommodate about 200 employees, according to Xconomy. Google’s current Madison office inside the Constellation building spans about 15,000 square feet.
In Google’s most recent economic impact report, the tech company reported that it provided $3.73 billion worth of economic activity in Wisconsin in 2017, benefitting 16,000 businesses in the state. In Illinois, Google reported providing $17.7 billion worth of economic activity, benefitting 48,000 states businesses.
Google’s news came a day before Amazon announced that it is canceling plans to build a corporate office in New York City after running into opposition from local lawmakers. The new office would have brought 25,000 jobs to the city.
Though Chicago civic and tech leaders were hopeful that Chicago may have had a second chance at landing Amazon’s half HQ2 when it was first reported that Amazon was reconsidering NYC, the tech company said it did “not intend to re-open the HQ2 search at this time.” It will, however, continue with plans to build an HQ2 in Northern Virginia and Nashville.
