Apple Announces Plans for a New Major Campus

Less than a year after settling into their massive new Foster + Partners–designed "spaceship" campus in Cupertino, it sounds like Apple has its sights set on another significant real estate project.

This week, the iPhone maker announced its intention to open a new major campus somewhere in the United States, presumably linked to Tim Cook & Co.’s plans to hire an additional 20,000 employees within the next five years. The declaration also comes shortly on the heels of their decision to pay $36.3 billion in tax payments on the company’s foreign-held earnings, an effort to deflect criticism from Trump and others who have criticized Apple’s reliance on overseas manufacturing.

There’s an obvious parallel between Apple’s announcement and Amazon’s drawn-out bidding process for its $5 billion, 50,000 employee “HQ2”, whose list of 20 finalist cities was coincidentally announced this week. However, there’s no indication as of yet that Apple would solicit bids from municipalities, as Axios reports that Apple won’t be "putting out a big request for proposals."

Should they choose to go the public bid route, interest would likely be massive. Amazon received a reported 238 bids from cities across North America, and officials from Philadelphia and Chicago (including Mayor Rahm Emanuel) have already lined up to curry Apple’s favor. There’s little doubt that whichever municipality is chosen will offer significant tax breaks in an effort to boost area employment, even if early reports suggest this campus’s jobs will have more to do with “technical support for customers” than designing whatever the next iPhone will be called (11? XI? 9?!). Most of this customer-support work is currently handled out of Apple’s Austin, Texas, campus, which employs roughly 6,000 workers.

Wherever Apple decides to build next, hopefully its employees will actually like the office space this time around.