Google to spend $1 billion on new complex in NYC

First, it was Amazon. com and now it’s Google announcing it will spend more than $1 billion to build a new office complex in New York City that will double the number of people it reemploys in the city to 14,000.

The 1.7 million-square-foot campus along the Hudson River in the city’s West Village neighborhood, called Google Hudson Square, will be the main location for Google’s advertising sales division, the Global Business Organization, Ruth Porat, senior vice-president and CFO, said in a blog post on Monday.

The news follows Seattle-based Amazon’s announcement a month ago that it would set up new headquarters in New York’s Long Island City neighborhood and in Arlington, Virginia, creating upwards of 25,000 jobs in each location.

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, has more than 2,000 employees in New York.

Google’s plan to invest outside its home base mirrors that of US tech giant Apple Inc, which said last week it would spend $1 billion to build a new 133-acre campus in Austin, Texas.

Google opened its first office in New York nearly 20 years ago in the city. Google said earlier this year that it would buy the Chelsea Market building for $2.4 billion and planned to lease more space at Pier 57, both along the Hudson about a mile north of the newly announced complex.

Tech companies are “coming to the realization that the San Francisco Bay Area, which has traditionally been the major center of tech activity in the US, is getting expensive and crowded,” Andrew Bartels, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told The Associated Press.

“A lot of vendors are coming to the realization that ‘We can probably find top talent elsewhere at a more affordable costs, and perhaps a better style of life for employees who may be struggling to make ends meet.’”

The Northeast is attractive because of its large concentration of highly educated young people. New York in particular also offers proximity to Wall Street and already has the second-biggest concentration of tech startups behind the Bay Area and a large base of tech employees, Bartels said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story.