Apple breaks ground on 1 million square foot Austin campus

apple campus austin

Over the past few weeks, Apple has started work on a new 39-acre campus in Austin, TX that will be the future home of the company’s US operations. The new buildout will be an extension of Apple’s current campus, which sits just off of Delcour Drive in northern Austin.

It’s not going to be as big as the iSpaceship campus Apple is working on in Cupertino, but Apple’s plans for the expansion include seven office buildings, combining for slightly more than 1 million square feet of office space, and the creation of some 3,600 local jobs…

Wired has the scoop:

“Apple has pulled three construction permits on the new campus — the most recent one just last week — and has started preliminary work on the site, county and city planners say.

In its development agreement with the city, Apple says that the new facility will be the overflow for Apple’s America operations outside of its Cupertino, California, headquarters. “The company requires an operational center to centralize various functions, such as accounting, human resources and finance,” Apple wrote in a description of the $287 million project, filed with city planners.”

Although Samsung runs a big chip plant in Austin, and word has it that Apple is looking to bring some of its product-making back to the US, Austin’s economic development manager Brian Gildea says that none of Apple’s new buildings are zoned for manufacturing.

Instead, it’s believed that the new campus will serve as a secondary operational center, for handling things like accounting, human resources and finance. Wired notes that Austin also hosts Apple’s support and hardware development groups, and it’s hiring engineers in the area.

According to Apple’s economic development agreement with Austin, Apple will first build a $56 million 200,000-square-foot facility in two buildings. And phase 2 will be up to 800,000 square feet in several buildings. Phase 1 should be done in late 2015, and phase 2 in 2021.

Jeff Coddington, senior vice president for investment properties with Austin realtor Oxford Commercial says that what Apple is doing is one of the most significant commercial development projects started in Austin this year. “It’s a huge vote of confidence in our region.”

But Texas isn’t the only place Apple is making waves. The tech firm has also recently started construction on a data center in Oregon, a small campus in Santa Clara, California, and is in the process of starting several others. It’s also rumored to have something to do with “Project Azalea,” a purported $10B chip-making factory that’s going up in either New York or Oregon.

Yeah, contrary to what some analysts are saying right now, business is good at Apple.