Google To Spend $10 Billion on Offices, Data Centers in US This Year (cnet.com) 20
Google is continuing to expand beyond its home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said Wednesday the company will invest more than $10 billion in offices and data centers across the US in 2020. From a report: "These investments will create thousands of jobs -- including roles within Google, construction jobs in data centers and renewable energy facilities, and opportunities in local businesses in surrounding towns and communities," Pichai said in a blog post. The search giant, which already has a presence in 26 states, said its new investments will be focused in 11 states: Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and California. This includes opening Google's new Hudson Square campus in New York City, which the company says gives it the ability to double its local workforce by 2028. Google also said its opening a new Google Operations Center in Mississippi to improve customer support for its users and partners.
Re: affluent backwards centralization, it's futile (Score:2)
Exit (Score:2)
Google is continuing to expand beyond its home in the San Francisco Bay Area...
This could be preparation to partially exit the Bay Area. I fly out to their several times a year and get an earful from fellow passengers who live there about how much they hate it and want to leave. According to news reports, California and especially SF are devolving into anarcho-tyrany.
Re: Exit (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
"Well, SF is a shit hole and has been for a great many years because of the fucking crazies the local crazy voters put into office."
Isn't it mainly a lack of housing for anyone who isn't working for a Second Dotcom Bubble FAANG or startup and making $300K a year? The fact that there's a reverse commute from SF to their suburban campus on the Google buses is proof that their employees are driving up the price of housing so they can live in some artisinal hipster neighborhood with expensive service businesses
Re: (Score:1)
The problem with this scene is that mountain view prices are, if anything a tad higher than SF, and the young workforce would just rather not live in the middle of the concrete wasteland that is the Silicon Valley urban nightmare.
There's more to SF's housing issues than tech companies. Like the Californian property tax situation, etc. Unfortunately those issues are ones the people complaining would actually be able to make changes to, if they put in some effort and, more problematically, thought. Which woul
Who is buying billions in ads? (Score:1)
Half of that goes to coffee and Red Bull (Score:1)
Really, these people are producing a whole lot of nothing, and chewing up resources.
Let's evaluate Google's past initiatives first... (Score:2, Interesting)
"These investments will create thousands of jobs -- including roles within Google, construction jobs in data centers and renewable energy facilities, and opportunities in local businesses in surrounding towns and communities..."
There was an initiative on housing...how far has this gone?
Let's be mindful of the fact that some of these companies make announcements then do nothing!
Let's evaluate first...
Re: (Score:2)
The announcement is likely to sugar coat something they want legislators to vote on in Googles favor. Happens all the time all over the place. When businesses talk about bringing jobs to an area there is very likely to be some quid pro quo going on there with legislators.
Easy to find out (Score:3)
There was an initiative on housing...how far has this gone?
Let's be mindful of the fact that some of these companies make announcements then do nothing!
Let's evaluate first...
A certain company's search engine could answer that [lmgtfy.com]....
The short of it is, they're in the approvals process now; indended delivery is 2023-2030.
They got tired with stepping in shit? (Score:2)
Re: They got tired with stepping in shit? (Score:1)
Like Aerospace and Defense companies (Score:3)
Pulling an IBM? (Score:3)
Back when IBM was at the height of its power, they spread out from their traditional home base of NYC and upstate NY, and set up shop in smaller cities. Obviously, Google going to Hudson Yards in NYC is not a cost-saving move, it's a hipster-collection operation. But in the other cases, it could be an IBM-style thing. They would open offices in university cities or close-to-university cities, just far away from HQ that the execs could drive or fly there in a few hours, but far enough from big cities so they controlled the techie labor market. Examples are Burlington, VT or Rochester, MN...far enough off the beaten track that they had their pick of the market.
I think this makes sense. I live in suburban NYC and while I really like it here, it's expensive. I have to be very careful to maintain my skills to a point where I'm still worth employing at market rate to stay here. SF/Silicon Valley (and Seattle to a lesser extent) are a step above this, and I fully admit we have a big affordability problem in NY. Putting up a minimum of $1M for a house or making a stark choice of a multi-hour commute each direction or living with 10 other people in a house just doesn't appeal to me, and this is coming from someone who pays a lot of taxes and deals with high-cost everything.
SF/SV may have a high concentration of tech talent, but that's less of a requirement if you drop the need for all those talented people to sit in the same team room staring at each other all day. After two Dotcom Bubbles, there are too many people who just don't even have to think about money anymore, and that drives the price up for people with normal jobs.
meanwhile guvmint to spend 5% of that... (Score:2)
Still no Hangar One restoration (Score:1)