Microsoft Corp. plans to spend about $1 billion over the next three years on an expansion that will add enough offices at its headquarters to house about 12,000 workers.
The Redmond-based software behemoth plans to add another 4,000 to 5,000 workers worldwide, most of them in the Seattle area, during the current fiscal year ending in June.
The plan, which calls for increasing Microsoft’s sprawling suburban campus by about one-third, will accommodate both new and existing workers.
Microsoft, which also is expanding overseas, said its plans call for bulking up its hometown campus more rapidly than previously anticipated.
What we thought just a year ago we might need to do over the course of a decade or longer, we are now here today to talk about doing much faster, Brad Smith, senior vice president for legal and corporate affairs, said at a news conference outside a building the company is tearing down to make way for a new one.
The company employed about 30,000 workers in the Puget Sound region out of more than 63,000 globally when it released its latest employment figures Sept. 30.
The expansion will include seven new buildings, and seven others the company has acquired. In total, that accounts for about half of the development agreement the city of Redmond approved in May, which outlined Microsoft’s development plans for the next 15 to 20 years.
This reflects our confidence in the future and our commitment to this region, Smith said.
Microsoft said it will spend $35 million over the next three to five years to help improve streets, sewers and other infrastructure, and add an overpass over busy State Route 520, a main thoroughfare between Seattle and its eastern suburbs. The improvements will aim to better deal with the congestion spurred by Microsoft’s growing campus.
Microsoft has been gathering up land and real estate in the area over the past few years. Last month, it agreed to pay $209.5 million for most of the Redmond office campus of insurance company Safeco Corp.
In December, Microsoft said it planned to nearly double its work force in India over the next four years, investing $1.7 billion and adding 3,000 jobs. And in January, Microsoft announced adLab, a joint effort to develop Internet advertising technology between workers at its Redmond campus and experts in its Chinese research lab.
Gov. Christine Gregoire, King County Executive Ron Sims, and Redmond Mayor Rosemarie Ives applauded Microsoft’s plans and called on fellow politicians to commit to transportation improvements for the region’s traffic-choked roads.
We have got to commit to Microsoft and other great companies that we are going to provide the basic infrastructure so that when they grow globally, they will stay here, Gregoire said.
After the news conference, Rob Short, a corporate vice president of a Windows operating system technology group, hopped into an excavating machine and broke away the first piece of the first building Microsoft is demolishing as part of the expansion plan.
The company said Short won the honor by donating $1,100 to a charity fund-raiser, which the company matched.
The company has not yet decided how many of its existing workers will move out of overcrowded offices and join newly hired workers in the offices created by the expansion. More detail on that is expected to be released this summer, Smith said.