Apple to Build a New Campus and Add Thousands of Jobs
Apple campus in Cupertino, California. Shutterstock
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Along with a new Austin campus, the company says it will add jobs at sites around the country.
Tech giants are spreading their tentacles everywhere. After Amazon and Google recently announced expansions, saying they would be building new company campuses, Apple entered the fray Thursday, with news that it too is branching out beyond its Cupertino, California headquarters.
Apple said in a statement that it plans to build another facility in Austin, Texas, which is already its second-largest site in the U.S., after Cupertino. The new 133-acre Austin campus will cost $1 billion to build, and 50 of those acres preserved for “open space,” a term the company didn’t define. It will run on 100% renewable energy and add 5,000 new jobs to the region in engineering, research and development, operations, finance, sales and customer support, the company said. This comes just a year after the company completed a brand new $5 billion campus in California, where employees routinely walk into glass walls.
The company currently employs 90,000 people across the U.S., having added 6,000 jobs in 2018, and says it will create 20,000 new positions nationwide by 2023. Texas won’t be the sole beneficiary of Apple’s success: It plans to add new sites in Seattle, San Diego, and Culver City, California, and expanding current locations in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado, in the next few years, “with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the U.S. over time.”
If the company’s own expansive definition of its contribution to national labor is to be believed, Apple is already responsible for creating and supporting more than 2 million jobs in all 50 states. According to its statement, “The booming App Store ecosystem is responsible for more than 1.5 million American jobs, bringing growth and opportunity from Atlanta to Anchorage, Alaska.”
Apple’s quiet announcement today was characterized by some as a veiled barb by its CEO Tim Cook at Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Business Insider said Cook was “throwing shade” with the news, having made little ado at all about its plans, unlike Amazon, which made much of its search for added campuses, pitting cities against each other in a competition to offer the retail giant as many tax write-offs and benefits as possible.
Ephrat Livni writes for Quartz, which originally published this article.
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