Apple’s first East Coast campus will be in North Carolina
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Apple announced plans Monday to open an East Coast research and development campus in the Research Triangle Park, a major expansion that will create at least 3,000 jobs, Axios’ Orion Rummler reports.
- North Carolina has courted Apple for about three years, and even changed the laws around incentives to make it easier for companies to get grants for “transformative projects.”
Why it matters: The Apple expansion further solidifies the RTP area as a destination for innovation, thanks to its flourishing tech ecosystem and proximity to research universities. The jobs Apple will create in the state will be in fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and software engineering.
Incentives: In exchange for building a $1 billion campus where it’ll pay workers an average of $187,000 per year, Apple will receive $845.8 million over 39 years from the state.
- That figure makes Apple’s announcement the largest of its kind in state history.
- It dwarfs the $388 million North Carolina last summer promised to Centene to establish a tech hub in Charlotte.
Apple’s campus will be 1 million square feet on the Wake County side of RTP, per the N&O, on the land around N.C. 540 near Cary and Morrisville.
My thought bubble: The fact that the two biggest jobs announcements in state history took place during the pandemic speaks highly to what companies think about doing business in North Carolina. This kind of growth in tech jobs will bolster the state’s competitiveness when companies are considering us against places like Austin and Seattle.
“Apple’s choice to grow in North Carolina comes at an important time for our state,” said N.C. commerce secretary Machelle Baker Sanders in a statement. “As we move past the hardships of the pandemic, we must work even harder to bring new opportunity to all people of our state.”