Tech giant Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, says it plans to invest $7B in U.S. real estate this year, with an addition of 10,000 new jobs as the company deals with rising internet traffic spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.
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This year's total represents a contraction in the company's spending on real estate. Last year, the company invested $10B in its physical operations, Reuters reports, and in 2019, it spent about $13B. As of late 2019, Alphabet held nearly $40B in real estate assets worldwide. Currently, the company employs about 84,000 in the United States.
In contrast to businesses that are leaving or contracting in high-cost California, the company will expand its headquarters in the Bay Area, as well as office footprints in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York, markets in which Google already has a large presence, though it didn't specify how much in each of those places.
Google says it will also invest in data center expansions in Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Texas. Its existing data center sites in Nebraska, Ohio, Texas and Nevada will be fully operational in 2021.
In an announcement on Google's website, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company generated $426B in economic activity in the U.S. in 2020. Pinchai also emphasized the company's diverse hiring.
"We’re already making progress: 2020 was our largest year ever for hiring Black and Latinx Googlers in the U.S., both overall and in tech roles," he wrote.
Lately, the company has been partnering with public health organizations to transform some of its buildings, parking lots and other spaces in California, Washington state and New York into Covid-19 vaccine centers.
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