Chase for talent pushes Apple, Google and Amazon far beyond west coast

Chase for talent pushes Apple, Google and Amazon far beyond west coast Many of the companies are trying to cozy up to top engineering schools in cities like Pittsburgh

This generation’s biggest technology companies — including Apple, Amazon and Google — have long been tied to their hometowns. Now these giants are increasingly outgrowing their West Coast roots.Driven by a limited pool of skilled workers and the ballooning cost of living in their home bases of Silicon Valley and Seattle, as well as President Trump’s shifting immigration policies, the companies are aggressively taking their talent hunt across the United States and elsewhere. And they are coalescing particularly around a handful of urban areas that are already winners in the new knowledge-based economy, including New York City, Washington, Boston and Austin, Tex.

This eastward expansion accelerated on Thursday when Apple said it would build a $1 billion campus in Austin, expanding its presence there to over 11,000 workers and becoming the area’s largest private employer. The decision followed Amazon’s highly publicized selection of Queens and Arlington, Va., last month for new offices that would house at least 50,000 employees. Google, too, is shopping for more real estate in New York that could enable it to more than double its work force of 7,000 in the city.

“They’re expanding out,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“Tech talent is in very short supply. So if these tech companies want to grow and flourish, they need to find talent in other parts of the country.”The chase for tech talent has been global for decades, and Silicon Valley’s older companies have had big offices all over the world for years. Intel, for example, has far more employees in Oregon than it does in READ

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