And Google is expanding elsewhere, too. It plans to develop a 50-acre area into offices, homes, shops, restaurants and parks in San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. And this year it opened new offices and data centers in cities including Detroit; Boulder, Colorado; and Los Angeles, as well as in such states as Tennessee and Alabama.
The bidding for programmers is driving salaries higher, which in turn is catapulting the average prices of homes in many parts of the San Francisco Bay Area above $1 million. Many high-tech workers are choosing to live elsewhere, forcing major tech employers to look in new places for the employees they need.
Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, has over 2,000 employees in New York.
Google hopes to move into the new campus by 2020. Porat said that the company's most recent investments give it the ability to more than double the number of Google employees in New York over the next 10 years.
Tech companies see New York as a way to gain a new perspective, one that is different from that of Silicon Valley, which can be seen as an "out-of-touch echo chamber," Bartels said.
