Alphabet Inc’s Google plans to invest more than US$13 billion this year on new and expanded data centers and offices across the US.
Chief executive Sundar Pichai in a blog post on Wednesday announcing the news said that the company is growing outside its Mountain View, California, home and across the midwest and south.
“2019 marks the second year in a row we’ll be growing faster outside of the [San Francisco] Bay Area than in it,” he wrote.
Google is to build new data centers in Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia.
Pichai estimated that the construction of the new centers would employ 10,000 workers.
It makes good political sense for Google to highlight its expansions outside coastal cities, CFRA Research analyst Scott Kessler said.
US legislators have paid increasing attention to Google and other big tech companies over the past year and are considering passing privacy laws to regulate the companies’ reach, he said, adding that investing more widely across the US could help it curry favor with federal politicians and officials.
Google is focused on expanding its cloud computing business, a market where it faces stiff competition from larger rivals Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp.
The company would have a physical presence in 24 states by the end of the year. It currently has locations in 21 states, and is expanding into Nevada, Ohio and Nebraska.
Its expansion is likely also a way to attract new employees, Kessler said.
Google is add an office in Georgia, and expand its offices in several cities, including in Seattle and Chicago.
Google said it spent more than US$9 billion on similar expansions across the country last year.
The company did not give an exact number of employees it expects to hire as a result of the expansions, but said that it would hire “tens of thousands” of full-time workers.
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