Spotlight on America: Apple to Build New Campus in North Carolina

Apple Inc. AAPL -0.20% said it would build a new campus and engineering hub in North Carolina as part of a series of investments planned in the U.S. over the next five years.

The technology giant said Monday the move would create at least 3,000 jobs in machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering and other fields in the Raleigh-Durham metropolitan area.

Those new jobs were part of a pledge to add 20,000 jobs in the U.S. by 2026, up from the roughly 95,000 people employed currently. Apple said in January 2018 it had 84,000 people in its U.S. workforce.

The Cupertino, Calif., company had been in talks in 2018 to locate a facility in North Carolina. Later that year the company announced a plan to locate a campus in Austin, Texas. Employees are expected to begin moving to the Austin site next year, Apple said.

Apple would join other technology companies such as International Business Machines Corp.’s Red Hat, Cisco Systems Inc. and Epic Games Inc. in having major technical hubs in the Raleigh area.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said the Raleigh facility would be Apple’s first entirely new campus and engineering hub in more than 20 years.

Gov. Cooper said he spoke Saturday with Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, who was appreciative that the legislature hadn’t embraced measures targeting transgender people and had rolled back House Bill 2, a 2016 law that required transgender people to use the public-facility bathroom associated with the sex listed on their birth certificate. “They want to be a committed partner with our state for the long term,” said Mr. Cooper, a Democrat, in a Monday press conference with legislative leaders.

Apple is eligible for an incentive package worth up to $845.8 million over 39 years, thanks to a North Carolina Department of Commerce program targeting technology companies that pledge to invest at least $1 billion in the state and create 3,000 jobs. The state legislature authorized these technology incentives as part of its unsuccessful plan to lure Amazon’s HQ2 in 2018.

“When a window closed, we had a big door open,” said House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican.

The move also reflects a yearslong push among tech giants based in Silicon Valley and along the West Coast to locate facilities and seek talent in other parts of the country. Amazon.com Inc. is building its second headquarters facility in Northern Virginia and has been expanding employment in cities such as New York and Phoenix. Tesla Inc. is building a new automobile factory in Austin, a region where companies including Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have located campuses.

Apple said Monday it planned to expand its workforce in California, Colorado and Massachusetts among other locations.

In all, Apple said it planned to spend more than $430 billion through 2026 with American suppliers, data-center investments, capital expenditures and dozens of Apple TV+ productions, among others. Investments through a fund the company launched in 2017 have gone to support companies such as XPO Logistics Inc., Corning Inc. and II-VI Inc. across the country, it said. Part of the spending will also go toward next-generation silicon development and 5G technology, the company said.

Apple, which has the largest market capitalization among public companies world-wide, has previously made announcements on its spending and investment plans. In 2018, the company set a five-year target to contribute more than $350 billion to the U.S. economy—a figure that included spending on parts and services with suppliers, federal tax payments and capital expenditures.

Monday, the company said it had significantly outpaced that target, though it didn’t provide specifics. It also said it was the nation’s largest taxpayer over the past five years, having paid almost $45 billion in domestic corporate income taxes.

Photo: Apple said the new campus is among a series of investments planned in the U.S. over the next five years.
PHOTO: YOSHIO TSUNODA/AFLO/ZUMA PRESS

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-build-new-campus-in-north-carolina-11619441000?page=1