Google LLC today announced that it will spend $2.1 billion to acquire St. John’s Terminal, a sprawling office building in Manhattan, to expand its New York operations.

The search giant originally added St. John’s Terminal to its network of office buildings through a lease that included an option to buy the facility. The deal, which is expected to wrap up in the first quarter of 2022, will expand Google’s corporate campus in Manhattan by 1.4 million square feet. The campus will provide Google with a total of 1.7 million square feet of office space when construction is complete.

The additional offices will support the search giant’s previously announced initiative to significantly grow its New York workforce. In 2018, the search giant disclosed plans to double its local workforce to 14,000 staffers by 2028.

Google already has more than 12,000 employees in the city. The Hudson Square campus of which the St. John’s Terminal building is part will function as the New York headquarters of the company’s Global Business Organization. The Global Business Organization includes Google teams responsible for sales and partnerships. 

When St. John’s Terminal opens in the middle of 2023, Google says that employees will be greeted by a “highly sustainable, adaptable and connected building” with numerous outdoor open spaces. The company has committed to offsetting 100% of the facility’s carbon emissions as part of its efforts to shift its entire operations to renewable energy by 2030. 

“The St. John’s Terminal site at 550 Washington Street, which we currently lease and expect to open by mid-2023, will be one part of the already sizable investment we’ve made in New York — Google’s largest office outside California,” Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Google LLC and parent company Alphabet Inc., wrote in a blog post today.

Previously, in 2018, Google acquired the 1.2 million-square-foot Chelsea Market in Manhattan for $2.4 billion. The company has also leased more than 300,000 square feet of space at Pier 57 for a new office. Porat disclosed today that the Pier 57 hub is set to be completed next year.

The newly announced $2.1 billion purchase of St. John’s Terminal could be part of the $7 billion investment in office and data center expansions that Google said it would make in 2021. As part of the same investment, which Google detailed in March, the search giant is spending $1 billion to grow its California presence and committed to creating thousands of new positions in Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. The company announced smaller hiring initiatives across several other cities.

Microsoft Corp., one of Google’s top rivals in the public cloud market, is currently pursuing a major office expansion initiative of its own. In 2017, Microsoft began a multibillion-dollar upgrade of its Redmond, Washington headquarters that will add 2.5 million square feet of office space to accommodate an additional 8,000 workers. The company has said it expects construction to be completed in 2022 at the earliest. 

Photo: Google