At a Tuesday evening Cupertino city council meeting, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the company is planning a new 50-acre campus near its current headquarters at Infinite Loop. He told council members: "Whatis happened at Apple is that our business has basically tripled in the last five or six years. What thatis meant is our headcount has greatly expanded. We have a great campus by [route] 280, but we are in 30 other buildings now."
He continued: "Weive rented every scrap of building we can find in Cupertino and our people keep getting further and further away from the campus." Mr. Jobs noted that the company originally looked outside of Cupertino when it started the process months ago, given the high cost of real estate in the area, "but we found something in Cupertino that was a possibility."
He said that the company purchased nine properties not far from the Infinite Loop campus and across from a 100-acre Hewlett-Packard parcel. "Our plan is to take down the existing buildings and put up more efficient structures," he explained. He added that Apple has not started designing the new campus yet, so it will take three or four years before itis completed. He expects somewhere between 3,000 and 3.500 employees will work there.
"Weire pretty thrilled," Mr. Jobs concluded. "Since weire your largest taxpayer, I thought you might be happy for us." City council members laughed at the comment and congratulated the Apple CEO on the companyis acquisition, as well as its recent success.
A Webcast of the meeting is available at the City of Cupertino Web site.