RENO, Nev. — Tech giant Google plans to invest more than $13 billion this year on new and expanded data centers and offices across the U.S. — including here in the Silver State.
CEO Sundar Pichai announced the news in a blog post Wednesday, Feb. 13.
“2019 marks the second year in a row we'll be growing faster outside of the (San Francisco) Bay Area than in it,” he wrote. "...With this new investment, Google will now have a home in 24 total states, including data centers in 13 communities.”
Google plans to build new data centers this year in Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia.
Pichai estimates this will lead to 10,000 new jobs.
In Nevada, state officials in late 2018 approved an application for Google to build a $600 million data center in the city of Henderson, southeast of Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, the company in 2017 spent roughly $29 million to buy 1,210 acres of land at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center to lock down land for a future data center campus. According to published reports, it is unclear which of these sites will be built upon in 2019.
The announcement last week is part of Google's enhanced focus on expanding its cloud-computing business, a market where it faces stiff competition from larger rivals Amazon and Microsoft.
Google said it spent more than $9 billion on similar expansions across the country last year.
