Apple spending $240M to expand its Austin, Texas campus

AppleInsider

Apple's early phases of its Austin Texas project are complete, and the next phase is soon to start at a cost of about $240 million.

Apple's Austin campus is getting bigger

The company currently has two campuses in Austin, the second of which it started building in 2019. The expansion will take place at this campus located at 6900 Parmer Lane.

Called Capstone Phase Two AC09 and Capstone Phase Two AC07, the projects are a four-story and a five-story building, respectively. The two buildings will add 419,441 square feet of office space.

Construction for both buildings will start on September 30, 2023, and have an estimated completion date of March 30, 2025, according to a recent report from MySA. Apple is using HKS Architects for both buildings.

Apple started constructing its first Austin campus in 2012, followed by its second campus in 2019. The second campus was part of the company's plan to increase its investment in the US and create jobs.

"Planned capital expenditures in the US, investments in American manufacturing over five years and a record tax payment upon repatriation of overseas profits will account for approximately $75 billion of Apple's direct contribution," Apple said at the time.

Read on AppleInsider

AutigerMark

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

Not after spending 5 Billion dollars to build the current HQ.

stevegee

i’d love to sit in on some of the meetings leading up to this decision. the pros: relatively cheap for land, infrastructure, people; “pro-business” climate; the cons: unreliable power grid, state government controlled by capricious people detached from reality. it’s a toss-up!?

thadec

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

Like any large company, Apple has regional headquarters all over the country (and globe). In the southeast, your regional headquarters is either going to be Atlanta or Charlotte (because Miami is too remote). The midwest? Chicago if you are a big company, someplace in Ohio if you are a smaller one. The southwest? It is Texas or nothing. Most of the progressive companies choose Austin, with the talent produced by the University of Texas as an excuse. I say "excuse" because Texas A&M University actually has the better engineering and computer science programs ... but A&M is the most conservative large public university in the country by a mile. But regardless Austin is where Elon Musk decamped to largely because he knew that it was going to have to be a place where many of the people that he wants to work for Tesla would accept living in, and this is likely where he is ultimately going to relocate Twitter also for the same reason. (Pretty much everyone in Austin these days are either Texas graduates or California transplants, if for no reason than they are now the only ones who can afford to live there because it is basically San Francisco - Texas branch.) 

But the more traditional companies - meaning not tech companies or those for whom progressivism is part of their brand - put their branch campuses in Dallas-Fort Worth. Unless you are an energy or transportation company, which means you go to Houston. Again, no other place nearby (New Mexico is too close to California to be a southwest branch, there are no good options in Arkansas, Oklahoma or Louisiana etc.) makes sense.

StrangeDays

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

Yeah nah. 

StrangeDays

JP234 said:

AutigerMark said:

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

Not after spending 5 Billion dollars to build the current HQ.

Well, they wouldn't be the first company to have a post office box registered as corporate HQ in a low tax state. Or country. Now would they?

What does that have to do with just having spent billions building the current HQ? Nothing. 

waveparticle

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

It is more meaningful in the goodwill sense. For productivity, no. Tesla built a plant in Texas. After two years its productivity still lags the Shanghai plant. But Tesla will enjoy favorable US government treatment which is not different from US government officials harshly criticizing CCP funding Chinese companies like that storage company(what is its name?).

thadec

waveparticle said:

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

It is more meaningful in the goodwill sense. For productivity, no. Tesla built a plant in Texas. After two years its productivity still lags the Shanghai plant. But Tesla will enjoy favorable US government treatment which is not different from US government officials harshly criticizing CCP funding Chinese companies like that storage company(what is its name?).

So do the California and Nevada Texas plants. But you didn't mention that because everyone - of a certain stripe - likes to bash Texas, Georgia and Florida just like everyone of the opposing stripe likes to bash California, New York and [insert big city here] (Chicago, Detroit, Washington D.C., etc). No one on the left likes to talk about the importance of Texas to the national company in areas outside of the oil companies that they hate for ideological reasons. The truth is that Texas is where the whole tech boom started in the first place. Except back then the "tech industry" was mostly hardware: semiconductors, electronics manufacturing etc. It was mostly electrical, mechanical and industrial engineering. But during the late 1980s through the 2000s when SOMEONE decided that shipping all that stuff overseas was a great idea - to be fair it was a bipartisan effort and the people who opposed it were written off as cranks ... with an EXCELLENT example being H. Ross Perot, founder of Electronic Data Systems from Texas - so the center of gravity shifted to the computer science and information technology types in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, so we gave up paying people to design and build things in Texas in the 80s and 90s in favor of the surveillance capitalism complex in Silicon Valley and thereabouts (Google, Facebook). Yet certain people insist that the latter is better 'cuz the sorts of awful terrible people that are all over Texas - Methodists and libertarians - are nowhere to be found in Silicon Valley. Never mind that it was that scene - people tinkering with electronics in their garage - that created Apple (and the American video game industry and a bunch of other cool stuff) in the first place.

waveparticle

thadec said:

waveparticle said:

JP234 said:

Apple opening another facility in Texas. Is this another step in moving company HQ to Texas to avoid California taxes? It's smart business, even though Texas culture is the exact opposite of Apple culture.

It is more meaningful in the goodwill sense. For productivity, no. Tesla built a plant in Texas. After two years its productivity still lags the Shanghai plant. But Tesla will enjoy favorable US government treatment which is not different from US government officials harshly criticizing CCP funding Chinese companies like that storage company(what is its name?).

So do the California and Nevada Texas plants. But you didn't mention that because everyone - of a certain stripe - likes to bash Texas, Georgia and Florida just like everyone of the opposing stripe likes to bash California, New York and [insert big city here] (Chicago, Detroit, Washington D.C., etc). No one on the left likes to talk about the importance of Texas to the national company in areas outside of the oil companies that they hate for ideological reasons. The truth is that Texas is where the whole tech boom started in the first place. Except back then the "tech industry" was mostly hardware: semiconductors, electronics manufacturing etc. It was mostly electrical, mechanical and industrial engineering. But during the late 1980s through the 2000s when SOMEONE decided that shipping all that stuff overseas was a great idea - to be fair it was a bipartisan effort and the people who opposed it were written off as cranks ... with an EXCELLENT example being H. Ross Perot, founder of Electronic Data Systems from Texas - so the center of gravity shifted to the computer science and information technology types in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, so we gave up paying people to design and build things in Texas in the 80s and 90s in favor of the surveillance capitalism complex in Silicon Valley and thereabouts (Google, Facebook). Yet certain people insist that the latter is better 'cuz the sorts of awful terrible people that are all over Texas - Methodists and libertarians - are nowhere to be found in Silicon Valley. Never mind that it was that scene - people tinkering with electronics in their garage - that created Apple (and the American video game industry and a bunch of other cool stuff) in the first place.

HP is earlier than TI, tight? The reason manufacturing was moved to overseas is because of the potential massive demand for High tech products which the US cannot satisfy. When Jobs and Wozniak created the Macintosh forty years ago, they were dreaming of putting one in the hands of every people in the world. Thirty years ago every survey of PC production there is a category of others besides Dell, HP, Asus, Apple. The others make PCs cheap enough for the rest of us. And Google planned to make Chrome PC that costs just $100. Texas every though its production cost is lower than California cannot satisfy this order. Right? 

Estbay_TexPat

Like any large company, Apple has regional headquarters all over the country (and globe). In the southeast, your regional headquarters is either going to be Atlanta or Charlotte (because Miami is too remote). The midwest? Chicago if you are a big company, someplace in Ohio if you are a smaller one. The southwest? It is Texas or nothing. Most of the progressive companies choose Austin, with the talent produced by the University of Texas as an excuse. I say "excuse" because Texas A&M University actually has the better engineering and computer science programs ... but A&M is the most conservative large public university in the country by a mile. But regardless Austin is where Elon Musk decamped to largely because he knew that it was going to have to be a place where many of the people that he wants to work for Tesla would accept living in, and this is likely where he is ultimately going to relocate Twitter also for the same reason. (Pretty much everyone in Austin these days are either Texas graduates or California transplants, if for no reason than they are now the only ones who can afford to live there because it is basically San Francisco - Texas branch.) 

But the more traditional companies - meaning not tech companies or those for whom progressivism is part of their brand - put their branch campuses in Dallas-Fort Worth. Unless you are an energy or transportation company, which means you go to Houston. Again, no other place nearby (New Mexico is too close to California to be a southwest branch, there are no good options in Arkansas, Oklahoma or Louisiana etc.) makes sense.

Hmmm… some slightly off stereotypes there with your description. Especially laughable believing aggie CS program is better! The recent mid-term showed that the student pop at atm is just as liberal as any big universities/colleges.