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- Google plans to open new offices in Houston and Portland, CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday.
- Google unveiled plans to spend $7 billion on offices and data centers across 19 states.
- Pichai said the expansions would create at least 10,000 new full-time jobs in the US this year.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Google plans to ramp up its real estate by investing more than $7 billion in offices and data centers across 19 states, despite the growing momentum for companies to let employees work from home permanently.
The tech giant's investment plans, announced Thursday, include spending more than $1 billion in the company's home state of California, even as top tech CEOs and investors are abandoning Silicon Valley in droves.
Google plans to open new offices in Houston, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, as well as expanding or improving existing offices in Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post Thursday. The company already has more than 84,000 full-time staff in the US.
Pichai said that the office and data center investments would create at least 10,000 new full-time jobs in the US this year, including thousands of office roles in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York.
"Coming together in person to collaborate and build community is core to Google's culture, and it will be an important part of our future," Pichai said.
This is in stark contrast to many other companies who are canceling office leases.
In December, Google delayed sending employees back to the office until September 2021, pushing back its previous return date by three months. Pichai also told staff it would experiment with a "flexible work week" once employees return, letting them work up to two days a week from home.
A Google spokesperson told Insider's Hugh Langley that it would encourage employees to get vaccinated before returning to the office, but wouldn't mandate it.
In a recent survey from workplace-technology firm Envoy, 47% of respondents said they would leave their current job if their company didn't offer a hybrid option post-pandemic.
Read more: If you want to ask your boss to let you work from home forever, use this script
On Thursday, the company said it would also expand its data centers in Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, and Texas. It is also opening its newest cloud engineering site in Durham, North Carolina, as well as the first US Google Operations Center in Southaven, Mississippi.
Pichai added that 2020 was Google's largest year ever for hiring Black and Latinx employees in the US, both overall and in tech roles.
But staff satisfaction is falling, according to the results of an internal survey obtained by Insider, where Google employees said that their wellbeing had declined significantly during 2020.