As part of its efforts, Google has spent more than $389 million to buy land in northern San Jose, California for the five-building hardware research and development centre
Tech giant Google is reportedly planning to build a campus that will house a huge hardware hub in Silicon Valley.
According to a report in CNBC on Saturday, the campus called ‘Midpoint’ will have 20 per cent office space and 80 per cent space focused on manufacturing devices, storage, distribution and other purposes.
The plans, which are filed as an “R&D” facility, show a center for hardware operations and a separate new tech campus that would be accessible to the public, sitting between its current headquarters in Mountain View and its recently approved mega mixed-use campus in San Jose.
As part of its efforts, Google has spent more than $389 million to buy land in northern San Jose, California for the five-building hardware research and development centre.
“It will sit adjacent to three industrial buildings that will house some operations for its hardware division, including Nest products, according to several planning documents,” the report mentioned.
The new space comes as Google appears to be bringing more hardware efforts in-house under executive Rick Osterloh, who oversees devices and services, including Nest, the Google Home smart speakers, its flagship Pixel smartphone, and the PixelBook laptops.
The hardware unit has produced minimal revenue for the company compared with its core internet services like Search, YouTube, and Google Cloud, but executives recently said it would be attempting to grab more market share this year.
Last week, Google announced it has developed its own custom-built chip to power the next generation of Pixel 6 smartphones that will arrive in the market later this year.
Called Tensor, the AI-enabled System on a Chip (SoC) has been developed specifically for Pixel phones. Google launched the first Pixel in 2016.
In January, it completed the acquisition of fitness tracking hardware company Fitbit, which had been held up in regulatory review for more than a year.
