About three months ago, Apple announced it planned to add 1,000 jobs in the San Diego region over the next three years. On Wednesday, the Cupertino, CA-based tech giant said it would increase that total by 200 jobs as part of a plan to make the city one of its principle engineering hubs.
Apple (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AAPL]]) has had a presence in San Diego for nearly 20 years. It employs about 600 people at its five retail stores across the county, and some small teams of Apple engineers also work in greater San Diego. The new jobs are anticipated to be in its hardware and software businesses.
To accommodate the growth, Apple says it will develop a campus with hundreds of thousands of square feet of office, lab, and research space in San Diego. The company hasn’t yet revealed where it plans to build the campus.
Nearly 200 of the 1,200 new employees Apple says it will hire in the next three years will be on board by year’s end, according to a statement from San Diego’s Mayor Kevin Faulconer.
According to the mayor, he and Apple representatives met over recent weeks, during which time he urged the company to bring more jobs to the region. Apple was attracted to San Diego because of the area’s pool of skilled professionals and partnerships between industry and academia, Faulconer’s statement said.
In December, Apple announced a major expansion of its U.S. operations, including a new $1 billion campus in Austin, TX; plans to build new sites and grow its local headcount to more than 1,000 in San Diego, Seattle, and Culver City, CA; and hundreds of new jobs in New York, Boston, Boulder, CO, Pittsburgh, and Portland, OR.
Apple said it grew its U.S. workforce by 6,000 in 2018, to about 90,000 people. By 2023, Apple has said it aims to have created 20,000 jobs in the U.S.
