Google opened its first office in New York nearly 20 years ago and now employs 7,000 people in the city. Its footprint has expanded continuously. Google said this year that it would buy the Manhattan 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.
A month ago, Seattle-based Amazon announced it would set up new headquarters in New York's Long Island City neighborhood and in Arlington, Virginia, creating upward of 25,000 jobs in each location.
But it's not just the East Coast that is benefiting from the expansion.
Apple, based in Cupertino, last week announced plans to build a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, that will create at least 5,000 jobs.
And Google is expanding elsewhere, too. It plans to develop a 50-acre area into offices, homes, shops, restaurants and parks in San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley. And this year it opened new offices and data centers in cities including Boulder, Colorado, Detroit and Los Angeles, as well as in such states as Tennessee and Alabama.
The bidding for programmers is driving salaries higher, which in turn is catapulting the average prices of homes in many parts of the San Francisco Bay Area above $1 million. Many high-tech workers are choosing to live elsewhere, forcing major tech employers to look in new places for the employees they need.
Facebook, based in Menlo Park, has over 2,000 employees in New York.
Google hopes to move into the new campus by 2020. Porat said that the company's most recent investments give it the ability to more than double the number of Google employees in New York over the next 10 years.
Not all tech companies are investing in areas outside of their original headquarters, however.
Microsoft is overhauling its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, with an 18-building construction project that will make room for an additional 8,000 workers. It currently employs about 47,000 in the area.