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It’s a Good Thing Texas Is a Big State
“T
The volume of HQ relocations shows no sign of letting up.
Houston, Texas
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he last one out of Silicon Valley, please turn out the lights.” Signage to that effect has yet to be seen in the Bay Area, but it may be only a matter of time. Corporate headquarters relocations to Texas, particularly from Silicon Valley, California, are on by MARK a roll; 2021 is forecast to see even more such activity than recent years. In 2020 alone, tech giants Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprises announced HQ relocations from California to Austin and Houston, respectively. Dallas is the new home base for commercial real estate services CBRE Group, which moved its headquarters from Los Angeles. In January 2021, data center giant Digital Realty Trust, based in San Francisco, also announced a headquarters move to Austin. Texas’ capital is also home to Tesla Motors’ gigafactory now under construction and is the new home
TEXAS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT GUIDE
of the electric car makers’ Cofounder and CEO Elon Musk. Reports of Tesla’s headquarters moving from Palo Alto to Texas were still speculation in early April. The Bay Area is not alone in seeing key headquarters departures for the Lone Star State. Also in 2020, Peter Rex, AREND founder and CEO of Seattle-based technology, investment and real estate firm Rex Teams, announced his company’s relocation to Texas, citing social unrest and high prices as being among the factors for the decision. Rex Teams had previously been based in San Francisco. As Rex noted in an October 2020 Fox Business interview, “Being a servant CEO, I want to provide my employees with a place where they can afford to buy a home, they can live abundantly and afford the cost of schooling. Second, I want to be in a place where the American Dream can flourish, which includes having
