Apple announced on Monday that it plans to open a new campus in the Raleigh, North Carolina area.
Apple will spend over $1 billion on the campus, and it will employ 3,000 people working on technology including software engineering and machine learning.
The campus is a sign of Apple’s continued expansion beyond its headquarters in Cupertino, California, where most of its engineering has historically been based. Apple is also building a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, which is expected to open to employees next year.
Apple’s expansion will be located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, which gets its name due to the nearby three universities: North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams both have MBAs from Duke. Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue, who is in charge of the company’s online services, graduated from Duke.
“As a North-Carolina native, I’m thrilled Apple is expanding and creating new long-term job opportunities in the community I grew up in,” Williams said in a statement.
Apple joins other Silicon Valley technology companies that are expanding outside the Bay Area to gain access to a wider pool of engineering talent and, in some cases, in response to high housing prices and other costs of living in the region.
For example, Oracle announced it will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas last year. Mountain View-based Google is spending $1 billion on a new campus in New York City and is redeveloping a former shopping mall in Los Angeles. Amazon’s second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia currently has 1,600 employees out of a planned 25,000.
On Monday, Apple also said it was rapidly expanding in other cities where it has engineering operations. It plans to employ 5,000 people in San Diego, California, 3,000 people in Culver City in Los Angeles, and 700 employees in Boulder, Colorado by 2026. Apple also said it employs 1,000 people in Seattle, Washington, and plans to double that to 2,000. In total, Apple said it plans to add 20,000 jobs in the U.S. over the next five years.
Still, Apple will continue to be based in Silicon Valley, where it has about 25,000 employees, including 12,000 employees in its loop-shaped headquarters. In total, including retail workers, Apple has 147,000 full-time employees, it said last year in a filing.
