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Google commits $13 billion for U.S. datacenters and offices in 2019

A colorful Google Bike is parked near a sign with logo for Google Inc at the Googleplex, the Silicon Valley headquarters of search engine and technology company Google Inc in Mountain View, California, April 14, 2018. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
A colorful Google Bike is parked near a sign with logo for Google Inc at the Googleplex, the Silicon Valley headquarters of search engine and technology company Google Inc in Mountain View, California, April 14, 2018. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Image Credit: Getty Images
@ahhensel

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For the second year in a row, Google says it’s growing faster outside of the Bay Area than in it.

In a blog post published today and attributed to CEO Sundar Pichai, the company says that it plans to invest $13 billion in datacenters and offices across the U.S. in the next year. That includes investments in new datacenters, as well as expanding the footprint of existing offices. With these investments, Pichai says that Google will now have a “home” in 24 states, and datacenters in 14 states.

“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,” Pichai wrote.

Here’s the breakdown of where the company will be putting its money over the next year:

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  • New datacenters in Ohio, Nebraska, and Nevada.
  • The expansion of existing datacenters in Oklahoma and South Carolina.
  • A new office and datacenter in Texas (though it’s unclear where exactly in the state this will be going — Google already has an office in Austin, Texas).
  • A new office and datacenter in Virginia, and a new office in Georgia. With those additions, Google says its workforce in both states will double.
  • Expanding offices in Wisconsin, Chicago, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. In some cases, Google will be moving the teams into larger office spaces over the coming years, such as with the creation of its “Hudson Square” campus in New York City.

Google also mentioned that it opened its first office in Detroit, Michigan in November, though it didn’t say that how many employees it expects to hire there in 2019.

It’s unclear how many of the workers at these new and existing offices are and will be full-time employees and how many are contractors. As of December, Google had 98,771 employees, according to its 10-K form.

The company’s increased investments in other offices continue as the cost of living in the Bay Area continues to rise faster than almost anywhere else in the country. However, the company’s Mountain View headquarters remain its biggest campus. Among the existing offices elsewhere in the U.S., Google describes its Massachusetts, Washington, and New York offices as key engineering hubs. Google’s Chicago office started out as a sales hub, but now houses product and engineering employees as well, according to the Chicago Tribune. The new Detroit space is primarily a sales office.

VentureBeat has reached out to Google for more information on how many people it will be hiring in its new offices, and will update this story if we hear back.