Tom Paine
Google posted on its blog Thursday its plans to invest across the US in 2021. Nothing on the scale of Amazon’s second city search, but Google says it will invest over $7 billion in offices and data centers, and add at least 10,000 new jobs in 2021.
There is nothing close to staggering about those numbers, since Google has 135.000 employees already and $85 billion in PP&E (Property, Plant & Equipment) on its balance sheet. Google plans to significantly expand its Pittsburgh presence. And it sounds like a major expansion is planned for the DC & Northern Virginal area. But one thing about Google’s plans is there is no mention of the Greater Philadelphia area.
i wasn’t able to retrieve the exact number of Google employees around Philly, but based on what I’ve seen my guess is its in the low hundreds (I don’t pay for premium access to LinkedIn).The major concentration seems to be around Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That may be partly due to GCP’s closeness to SAP in building its enterprise cloud business. Another area of emphasis for the Philly area is Life Sciences.
In terms of physical plant, there is nothing in the Philly area in Google’s listing of locations nationwide. Although that doesn’t necessarily mean Philly doesn’t have a Google office, as we found out once before.
Former SAP executive Rob Enslin is Google’s California-based President of Cloud Sales.. Phillip Moyer, a Philly-based onetime Safeguard Scientifics exec, moved in 2019 from Amazon to GCP, setting off a suit over an alleged non-compete violation from Amazon (since settled). His title is Vice President- Strategic Industries (encompassing Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, CPG, Telco, Media & Entertainment, Gaming).
I’ve requested of Google’s press center any information it can provide on specific stats or plans it may have for Philadelphia. I’ll let you know if I get anything back
