Google beefs up Boulder presence

BOULDER — Google is expanding its Boulder operation with additional offices and employees at its 3333 Walnut St. facility.

The tech giant, which confirmed the expansion to BizWest Tuesday, has been adding operational square-footage at the central Boulder office complex steadily for the better part of a year. Google now leases the entirety of the nearly 160,000-square-foot facility.

In spring 2019, CA Technologies Inc., the New York-based software company that acquired Rally Software Development Corp. in 2015 for $490 million, vacated its Boulder office and freed up real estate in the Walnut Street building. Google then leased an estimated 75,000 square feet of the complex, adding to the 30,000 square feet that it subleased from CA Technologies in 2017.

A Google spokeswoman told BizWest that the firm recently leased an additional two floors in the three-floor building and will occupy the new space this summer.

Based on real estate norms for tech employers of 150 square feet per employee, that means the added space could accommodate more than 1,000 workers on Walnut Street.

The spokeswoman said the third building at Google’s 300,000-square-foot main campus at 2930 Pearl St. is expected to be occupied beginning this spring. That campus was designed to house 1,500 employees.

In addition to the main campus and the Walnut Street space, the company has Boulder offices at 2590 Pearl St., 2600 Pearl St. and 2525 28th St. Among Google’s other Boulder operations is subsidiary and health-care technology firm Verily Life Sciences.

The Walnut Street space houses gTech, or Google Technical Services, which provides technical expertise to partners using Google products. Google’s Boulder operations more generally focus on product development and engineering for business units including Chrome, Google Maps, GSuite, payments, people operations and advertising. The 28th Street offices are home to Google Nest, which makes smart-home devices like thermostats, cameras and smoke alarms.

The Google spokeswoman told BizWest that the firm now employs more than 1,300 employees in Boulder; however, it is not clear how those workers are divided among those offices. 

Google’s first local foothold came with its acquisition of SketchUp in 2006, a company that was eventually divested in 2012.

Google is not the only major technology player to quietly bolster its Boulder presence. Late last year, Apple Inc. began moving workers into a 40,000-square-foot office complex on Sterling Drive, less than three miles from the Google space. 

Apple has declined to comment on its Boulder operations beyond a statement about a year ago that the firm’s local headcount could jump from 100 to 250 current workers to 250 to 500 by 2022.

“From tech startups to multinationals like Google, IBM, Amazon and others, their presence in Boulder is mostly attributable to the region’s strong tech talent pool,” Boulder Economic Development Council executive director Clif Harald said in an email. “Our region is experiencing a rising tide of talent and businesses that’s lifting most if not all of our technology boats.”

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