Google is set to make major investments in 2021 as the company increases its spending following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Google has announced it will spend more than $7 billion on real estate across the U.S. in 2021. The real estate will be used to expand Google office spaces and data centers across 19 different states.
With the new spaces will come new jobs. The company expects to create at least 10,000 new jobs this year. The additional staff and spaces are part of the company anticipating a post-pandemic recovery spurring new business.
Google said its annual investment plan is aimed at expanding existing sites, but that it is also creating three new office sites in Minnesota, Texas, and North Carolina.
“We’re investing aggressively in the U.S. in 2021. We’re both building on our existing major centers, as well as expanding across the US. We’re not only increasing the number of jobs across the U.S., but in particular, we’re bringing more jobs and investment to diverse communities across the U.S.,” said Ruth Porat, the Chief Financial Officer of Google’s parent company Alphabet, in a new interview with Yahoo Finance.
Roughly a year ago, the company had a slowdown in investment as the COVID-19 pandemic began to get more serious. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, sent a memo to his employees last April announcing that the company would slow down hiring.
The commitment to new investments signals a shift in a positive direction for Google, which has flourished over the past year, benefiting from an accelerated increase in online ad spending.
“Coming together in-person to collaborate and build community is core to Google’s culture, and it will continue to be an important part of our future. So we continue to make significant investments in our offices around the country, as well as our home state of California, where we will be investing over $1 billion this year,” Sundar Pichai said in a blog post Thursday.
While the uptick in investment is good for the company, it is still not spending at its pre-pandemic levels quite yet. Google had invested an annual average of $11 billion in 2018 and 2019.
The data center expansion is an important move for Google as the company is aggressively growing its cloud business. During an earnings report, it was revealed that Google’s cloud business lost $5.61 billion on $13.06 billion revenue last year. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told investors last month that he is now focused on growing the cloud business with the hope that it will be profitable down the road. Google has already doubled the number of data centers it has since 2018.
Google plans to return to in-person work this fall after the company was one of the first major U.S. corporations to formally extend the period for employees to work remotely until July 2021.
