Google has a presence in 26 states across the country and our new investments will be focused in 11 of them: Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and California.
Everywhere we invest, we strive to create meaningful opportunities for local communities. A powerful example is our data center in Pryor, a town in Mayes County, Oklahoma. Last year, I visited Pryor to announce a $600 million investment, our fourth expansion there since 2007. It felt like the whole community came out to welcome us, from small business owners to teachers to Google employees. Pryor Mayor Larry Lees told the crowd that Google’s investments have helped provide local schools with the resources they need—including the latest textbooks and STEM courses—to offer a world-class education. He talked about the small businesses we have helped train and the mentorship Googlers have provided to Pryor’s students.
This is exactly the kind of difference we hope to make with our new office and data center projects in 2020. 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.
This effort builds on the momentum of the $13 billion investment in communities from South Carolina to Nevada we made in 2019. Combined with other R&D investments, Google’s parent company Alphabet was the largest investor in the U.S. last year, according to a report from the Progressive Policy Institute.
We look forward to continuing this progress in the year ahead. Here’s a look at our 2020 investments by region:
South
Google continues to invest in Atlanta, and we will be welcoming new engineering teams to our growing office there this year. We will also invest in expanded offices and data centers in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. Plus, we’ll open a Google Operations Center in Mississippi to improve our customer support for users and partners around the world.
Breaking ground at our office development in Atlanta in 2019. We’re expanding our space in Atlanta this year.
Midwest
We recently opened a new Google Cloud office in Chicago and expanded our office in Madison, Wisconsin. We’ll make additional investments in our offices in Detroit, open a new data center in Ohio, and complete the expansion of our data center in Iowa.
Ribbon cutting at our new Google Cloud office in Chicago in 2019.
Central
In Colorado, we have the capacity to double our workforce over the next few years, in part by expanding our presence in Boulder. We’ll also invest further in growing data centers in Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Google’s Mayes County, Oklahoma data center expansion event.
East
We’re opening our new Hudson Square campus in New York City, where we have the capacity to double our local workforce by 2028. We’re also expanding our office in Pittsburgh, and a bigger office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is under development.
West
We are expanding our Google Cloud campus in Seattle and undertaking a major development in Kirkland to open later this year. We’re making office and data center investments in Oregon. In California, we continue to invest in new locations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
We’ll also accelerate our work with businesses, governments, and community organizations to distribute the $1 billion we committed for Bay Area housing. In the first six months of this commitment, we’ve helped to create more than 380 new affordable housing units in the Bay Area, including an investment in a development focused on affordable and inclusive housing for adults with disabilities. There’s more to come in 2020.
In addition to these investments in infrastructure and jobs, we’ll also continue our work nationally with local startups, entrepreneurs and small business owners to help Americans access new digital opportunities. Already Grow with Google and Google for Startups have trained more than 4 million Americans in hundreds of communities across all 50 states. Looking ahead, we're especially excited about our work creating pathways to jobs in the fast-growing field of IT through our two Grow with Google certificate programs.
Our growth is made possible only with the help of our local Googlers, partners and communities who have welcomed Google with open arms. Working together, we will continue to grow our economy, create good jobs for more Americans and make sure everyone can access the opportunities that technology creates.
