Google Plans Major Expansion for Its Washington Site

Employees’ Top Resolutions for 2013

Google plans a major expansion of its facilities in Kirkland, Wash., a site it originally set up with an eye to luring talent from neighbor Microsoft.

It plans to add 180,000 square feet — two buildings connected by an atrium — to be completed by the second quarter of 2015. The new space will accommodate up to 1,000 workers, according to The Seattle Times.

It also plans a major hiring push at this engineering hub, one of its largest outside of Mountain View, Calif. The company already employs more than 1,000 people between offices in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood and suburbs Bothell and Kirkland. The more than 600 employees in Kirkland work on products such as Google+, Maps and the Chrome Web browser, reports GeekWire.

In the expansion, however, Google will be doubling down on cloud services, according to The New York Times. Neighbor Amazon is well established in that arena, with Microsoft jockeying for position there as well.

It quotes Brian Goldfarb, Google’s leader of cloud platform marketing, who was lured away from Microsoft last year, as saying:

“We’re not the first in this rodeo, but we have the history of Google. We have the best data centers on the planet. You can’t really give engineers a bigger, badder thing to work on.”