Google announced plans on Monday to expand its New York presence and more than double its workforce in the city with a 1-billion-dollar campus in Manhattan's West Village.
The company plans to move into part of the new 1.7-million-square-foot Google Hudson Square campus by 2020, and another building in 2022. The campus will be the main location for the company's New York-based Global Business Organization, the tech firm said in a blog post.
Along with the tech giant's 2.4-billion-dollar deal in March to buy Manhattan's Chelsea Market complex, the expansion will allow the company to more than double the number of Google employees in New York over the next decade, the company said.
"New York City continues to be a great source of diverse, world-class talent - that's what brought Google to the city in 2000 and that's what keeps us here," Google's Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in the post.
Alphabet earlier this year said it was buying the Manhattan Chelsea Market for $2.4 billion, and planned to lease space at Pier 57 on the Hudson River. The company currently employs some 7,000 people in New York.
"With these most recent investments in Google Chelsea and Google Hudson Square, we will have the capacity to more than double the number of Googlers in New York over the next 10 years," Porat said.
She said the company's "investment in New York is a huge part of our commitment to grow and invest in US facilities, offices and jobs."
The new site is a former industrial area adjacent to the Greenwich Village and Soho districts.
The expansion would make California-based Alphabet one of the city's largest commercial tenants, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The move comes weeks after online retail giant Amazon announced it would base one of its new headquarters in New York's Long Island City neighborhood in Queens.
Finding new workers
Alphabet, Amazon and Apple are three of the world's most valuable corporations and have been outgrowing their home bases even with new headquarters building.
Google this month released an updated plan for expanding its Mountain View, California, headquarters to create a new village-type campus with more than 6,000 new homes, some of which would be available to low-income residents.
Both Google and Apple handled their expansion plans quietly, while Amazon asked for municipalities across North American for proposals, prompting critics to call it a "Hunger Games" contest.
All three companies have been struggling to attract workers with technology skills, and that appears to have been a key factor in the three expansion moves.
The massive growth in the tech sector has however passed over much of America's industrial heartland, creating economic and social rifts.
Porat said the latest investment "is a huge part of our commitment to grow and invest in U.S. facilities, offices and job," and added that "we're growing faster outside the (San Francisco) Bay Area than within it, and this year opened new offices and data centers in locations like Detroit, Boulder, Los Angeles, Tennessee and Alabama."
