Google seems to like the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Today the Waterloo Record reported that the Silicon Valley-based tech giant is expanding into larger quarters in Kitchener.
Google previously occupied a room in the Tannery building in Kitchener, where Desire2Learn and Communitech also reside. Now the company will move into the Breithaupt Block at King street.
“We’ve signed a lease for new office space at the Breithaupt Block to accommodate the natural growth of our engineering and development team at our Kitchener-Waterloo office,” Google Canada’s Leslie Church confirmed in an email statement to the Record.
The company said it doesn’t know when it will move in just yet. It originally came to Kitchener-Waterloo in 2005, upon the acquisition of Reqwireless, a mobile phone software developer.
“At that time, it had about 30 employees in the University of Waterloo’s research and technology park. By the time it moved into the 34,000 square feet of space in the Tannery in 2011, it had grown to about 100 employees, and now, it employs 240 people in Kitchener,” wrote the Record.
On Thursday Allied Properties, the half-owners of the Breithaupt Block, announced that a “substantial tenant” had signed a long-term lease for 185,000 square feet of space, starting later this year and the rest in the early part of 2016. The company also revealed that the additional two-storey building being developed for early 2016 will bring the total leasable space on that block to 221,000 square feet, a sizeable space for a sizeable global leader.
