Google outlines $7B U.S. data center, office investment

19 Mar Google outlines $7B U.S. data center, office investment

Google plans to invest more than $7 billion to expand data centers and offices in the U.S. this year, with a pledge to create at least 10,000 full-time jobs at the company across several states, according to a post by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in The Keyword blog.Detailing the investment by regions, Pichai wrote that in the South, “We’re increasing our investment in our South Carolina data center, establishing our newest Cloud engineering site in Durham, North Carolina, and opening the first U.S. Google Operations Center in Southaven, Mississippi.”
He added that in Virginia the company will expand its Loudon County data center, and open a new office building in Reston. Meanwhile, a new data center in Midlothian, Texas is now operational, Pichai said, and elsewhere in that state Google will open a new office in Houston–its first there–and will continue to invest in its office campuses in Austin. Google’s campus in Atlanta is benefiting from ongoing investment as well.

Among its efforts in the Midwest, Google plans to expand its data center footprint in Nebraska “with an additional investment, and make further improvements to our Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Chicago offices,” Pichai stated. Already this year, Google has established its first office in Rochester, Minnesota, and has turned up operations at data centers in New Albany, Ohio, and Papillion, Nebraska. 
In the East region, Google said it will increase the size of its Washington, D.C., workforce, while continuing to expand its office campus presence in New York, where in 2018 it made a commitment to double its workforce there by 2028. The company also will continue to invest in its Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania offices.
Out in the West, Google now has a fully operational data center in Henderson, Nevada, but already plans to expand that facility this year, along with another data center in Storey County near Reno. the company also plans to open a new office in Portland, Oregon, while continuing to invest in its Kirkland and Seattle campuses in Washington State. And in its headquarters state of California, Pichai stated that Google “will continue to invest in our offices in the state and support affordable housing initiatives in the Bay Area as part of our $1 billion housing commitment. We project that our $250 million investment fund will help create 24,000 housing units by 2029.”
RELATED: Watch out AWS and Azure; Google Cloud plans to compete more aggressively
Pichai’s post represents the latest statement in what has become an annual outlining of where Google is investing its as it continues to chase Amazon Web Services in the cloud market. In February 2020, Google detailed a $10 billion investment plan affecting facilities in 11 states across the U.S.
According to recent figures from Synergy Research Group, Google has gradually gained market share in the cloud provider market, although it remains in third place, while second-place Microsoft has closed the market share gap a little more quickly against still-dominant market share leader AWS.