Google says it will spend $13B this year on expanding data centers and offices across the US, adding a new office in Virginia as it doubles its workforce there
popular from Facebook and Google — are total crap w/r/t “job creation"http://www.cnbc.com/ ... http://twitter.com/... Ron Miller / @ron_miller : Have you ever toured a data center? It's crazy. There are maybe 10 people running the entire place. These don't tend be huge employment opportunities. http://twitter.com/... Myles Udland / @mylesudland : Did I miss the 217-city audition for this? https://twitter.com/... Hamza Shaban / @hshaban : Google CEO: “2019 marks the second year in a row we'll be growing faster outside of the Bay Area than in it.” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This $13B announcement is the opening move in what became Google's annual US infrastructure ritual: it was followed by a $10B pledge for 2020 across 11 states, a $7B-plus commitment with at least 10K new full-time jobs in 2021, and a $9.5B plan with 12,000 jobs for 2022. Each year's number is benchmarked against the last, making the announcement itself a recurring instrument.
The Virginia office and workforce doubling extend a deliberate geographic shift already visible in the coverage: the CEO noted 2019 is the second straight year of faster growth outside the Bay Area, building on Ruth Porat's earlier pledge to double Google's New York staff over a decade and a Canadian expansion from 1,500 to 5,000 employees by 2022.
First-order effects
- Virginia gains a new Google office and a doubled local workforce, while the $13B funds data-center and office construction across the US in the same year.
- The announcement establishes the baseline figure that later years' pledges — $10B, then $7B+ with a 10K-jobs promise — are measured against.
Second-order effects
- States compete for inclusion in these rounds — the 2020 follow-up explicitly named 11 target states including MA and NY — turning Google's siting decisions into a recurring contest among state governments.
- The job-creation framing invites scrutiny because data centers are lightly staffed — commentators in the coverage note roughly ten people can run an entire facility — pushing Google to attach explicit headcount pledges, like the 2021 10K-jobs figure, to future capital announcements.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annualized infrastructure pledges harden into a standing political and labor-relations tool, where each year's dollar figure functions more as a public commitment device than a disclosure of actual construction plans.
- Tech employment structurally disperses beyond the Bay Area: with New York set to double over a decade, Canada tripling by 2022, and Virginia's workforce doubling, secondary metros become the default venue for big-tech headcount growth.
The trend: Google has converted US data-center and office spending into a recurring annual headline number, using the escalating figures to anchor state relationships and justify hiring outside the Bay Area.