Apple is coming to The Triangle.
Local news station WRAL reported May 16 that Apple is set to open its second headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company announced in January that it planned to establish a second headquarters, away from its Cupertino, California, base, employing up to an additional 10,000 people wherever it chose to plant roots. Unlike Amazon, which last year launched a very public competition among cities to win its HQ2, Apple has conducted its business in private, as it tends to do. ”We’re not doing a beauty-contest kind of thing,” CEO Tim Cook recently told Recode’s Kara Swisher.
WRAL’s report suggests that all that’s standing between Apple coming to Raleigh is local legislators passing a bill to give Apple a package of tax incentives. Cook also apparently met with North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, when he was in the state to give the commencement speech at Duke University this weekend. Cook attended Duke for grad school, as did Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. Eddie Cue, the company’s head of software, attended for undergrad.
It’s unclear what the new headquarters will be used for—Apple has hinted that it could be mainly for customer-support representatives—but WRAL suggests there would be higher-paying tech jobs at the new site as well. If Apple did choose the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill triangle for its second headquarters, it would join a host of other blue-chip companies in the area, including IBM, Cisco, EMC, BASF, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Apple is also being pursued by Virginia to move into an area near where Apple opened its first retail store in 2001, Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia. (Apple also leases a fair amount of data center space in the area.)
Apple wasn’t immediately available to comment on its plans, nor was Cooper’s office.