Google Plots Big Expansion in India as US Restricts Visas
- Reference: 0180726918
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/03/190223/google-plots-big-expansion-in-india-as-us-restricts-visas
- Source link:
[2]non-paywalled source
, with the possibility of taking millions of square feet in new office space in Bangalore, India's tech hub. From a report:> Google's parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corridor, totaling 2.4 million square feet, according to people familiar with the deal. The first tower is expected to open to employees in the coming months, while construction on the remaining two is set to conclude next year.
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> Options in the real estate industry give would-be tenants the exclusive right to rent, or in some cases buy, a property at a predetermined price within a specific time frame. It's also possible Alphabet will not exercise the option to use the additional towers. If it does take all of the space, the complex could accommodate as many as 20,000 additional staff, which could more than double the company's footprint in India, said the people, asking not to be identified because the plans aren't public. Alphabet currently employs around 14,000 in the country, out of a global workforce of roughly 190,000.
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> [...] US President Donald Trump's visa restrictions have made it harder to bring foreign talent to America, prompting some companies to recruit more staff overseas. India has become an increasingly important place for US companies to hire, particularly in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-03/alphabet-plots-big-expansion-in-india-as-us-restricts-visas
[2] https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2026-02-03/alphabet-plans-major-india-expansion-as-us-tightens-visa-rules-bloomberg-news-reports
Old boss once told me.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Old boss once told me, he'd set up a complete call center for a US client in India, for less than he paid any one of his engineers, maybe 10 years before he and I worked together.
Just move to India already, Google. It's cheaper, and no burdensome regulations. You'll be free to exploit your workers far more than you do here.
I mean, that's Google's purpose, right? Pay as least as possible for everything, including people and talent?
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No burdensome regulations? Try opening a company there. Of course, for giants like Google, it won't be remotely problematic, since both the Indian government and various state governments will fall over each other to land them in their states
But other than them, there is a whole host of legacy bureaucratic procedures that people have to go through before their companies can operate. There is a reason foreign companies typically prefer countries like Singapore or Vietnam to India
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> No burdensome regulations? Try opening a company there.
Company staffing the place was already Indian. All he did was stand up the new building, connections, lines, etc.
Paperwork is dispensed with, if you have the right "government forms." DD Form 100 is universally accepted.
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Yeah, I mentioned that above - that for Google and other giants, they don't need to worry. Indian state governments are more than happy to do what it takes to get them into their states
It's a different story for no-name companies trying to enter
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At least the lie would be gone. Importing infinite Indians to fill your roles here is of little practical difference to the rest of us than simply moving the company.
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I mean, that's Google's purpose, right? Pay as least as possible for everything, including people and talent?
That's literally what all businesses are doing through all departments every day. The entire goal of businesses is to produce the most value for as little resources as possible.
I don't know how clueless you have to be to make the statement above, but it shows how pitiful our education system really is.
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> I mean, that's Google's purpose, right? Pay as least as possible for everything, including people and talent?
Of course: Google is a for-profit organization, not a charity. They will do whatever it takes within the law to maximize their profit, and whatever they can get away without the law as long as they do not get caught, or as long as the cost of getting caught is not as high as the profit obtained. They do that all the time: when, say, the EU imposes a tens of millions of euros fine on Google, Google just pays up as part of the cost of inherent to maximizing their profit - such fines are to Google what a few d
Employment at will (Score:2)
is generally only a thing in the United States. It's an alien concept in the rest of the world outside the USA. It's a lot harder to fire people for no reason in the rest of the world.
The whole employment-at-will thing was a big driver of H-1B visas. Bosses don't like the employment laws in the rest of the world they crave the power to fire someone for any reason or no reason whatsoever. So they import bodies to the USA so they are subjected to the shitty employment laws the United States has.
Of course, the
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You do get the same practice basically only in the 3rd world. The US is a fossile in many regards.
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That's the effect of Republicans with an Industrial Revolution mindset that revolves around only catering to the wealthy.
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Tammany Hall was dissolved in 1967, around the time that the Republican and Democratic parties [1]finished switching places ideologically. [studentsofhistory.com] It's right there in the Wikipedia article you cited.
If you want to claim Rs and Ds are the same, you'll need an example that's more robust.
[1] https://www.studentsofhistory.com/ideologies-flip-Democratic-Republican-parties
Re: Employment at will (Score:3)
> The whole employment-at-will thing was a big driver of H-1B visas. Bosses don't like the employment laws in the rest of the world they crave the power to fire someone for any reason or no reason whatsoever. So they import bodies to the USA so they are subjected to the shitty employment laws the United States has.
That literally makes no sense.
H-1B visas became popular because you could hire foreign workers for less money than US-born workers, it was to save money. You really think corporations sponsored H-1B workers, relocated them, dealt with all the cultural and linguistic issues just so they could fire them at will? Really? Had the corporations gotten bored of firing Americans at-will , so they imported a bunch of foreign workers just for the thrill of being able to fire them without cause?
That is non-sensical.
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Offshoring is even more profitable. Since now the company can hire people not merely for lower salaries than American citizens, but for salaries commensurate w/ Indians, which is even orders of magnitude lower. On top of that, they no longer need to sweat over visas, nor deal w/ cultural or linguistic issues
All that said, one reason H1Bs were popular was that there was a time (in the 90s) that American citizens were pretty picky about the companies they worked for, which resulted in many companies not b
Who could have predicted this? Who? (Score:1)
Oh yeah, anyone who's not as stupid as the average MAGA.
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Truly astounding that you aren’t getting hired.
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You got modded down, but as I noted elsewhere, if a company needs to hire a lot of people from country X, then they might as well open up an office in that country, and enable their employees to continue to live where they are, while working for them. It is pretty disruptive to both countries to pluck them from country X and relocate them to country Y
I know that /.ers are Leftist, but it still beats me why they think that people of country X are better off being relocated to country Y, where they have to
Re: At least they will keep their culture in India (Score:2)
Slashdot commenters used to be very anti-H-1B visa, there was a time when there seemed new H-1B visa-related story's on a near daily basis, now we think it's important to bring every engineer we can find to America? Really? Why?
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> Slashdot commenters used to be very anti-H-1B visa, there was a time when there seemed new H-1B visa-related story's on a near daily basis, now we think it's important to bring every engineer we can find to America? Really? Why?
Yeah, this struck me as well. Slashdot commentators, like a huge percentage of the population, don't like H1B visas. Well, this is a solution - the companies in question, instead of applying for more H1B visas, hire the same people in their home country, and w/ it, get the added advantage of a much lower scale of employment related expenses. If anything, they should welcome these companies hiring these people where they live, rather than bringing them to a country where a lot of them will feel like fish
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> I know that /.ers are Leftist [...]
If that is true, and it may well be, I wonder why.
Anyone with foresight saw this coming (Score:3)
The multinationals, which use H-1B's extensively, and also already have numerous locations around the world, have always been going to be able to add employees where it made the most sense for the company, and that includes financially. This administrations visa restrictions and taxes is going to end up making it clear to those multinationals that it makes sense to move more and more employees outside of the US. It is hard to believe that someone did not make that point to the administration as part of the decision process. So this must be what the administration wants (i.e. for multinational tech to go elsewhere).
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The president made the argument to Laura Ingraham that he wanted those foreign employees to come to the US and work, since we don't have citizens w/ the required skills. But it hardly makes sense to uproot them from their countries and bring them here, which, even w/o the visa work, is more expensive than just opening up offices there. If needed, they could be brought to the US temporarily for training purposes, but beyond that, they might as well work for these same companies sitting in their home countr
The law of un(?)intended (Score:1)
consequences at play.
Indian employees best deployed in India (Score:4, Interesting)
Fully endorse this. If they want to hire Indians, for whatever reasons, just have offices in India! Instead of uprooting your employees from their homes in India, where they have families, relatives and others who can support them, just have your offices there. No need to struggle w/ visas, nor pay them US salaries (which they'd have to if they were to afford the living costs in the US). Pay them what is standard there, and set up the operations there accordingly
I have seen people, particularly the "free trade" crowd, argue that bringing them here brings jobs to Americans, since these new immigrants/guest workers have to buy products here locally. Doesn't quite work, since those here temporarily would tend to convert dollars to rupees, determine that things are too expensive, and avoid shopping all that much. Also, if we want assimilation w/ US culture, it won't happen as much, as for most of them, English is a second language. If people don't like the "press '2' for Espanol", imagine when they have to press different numbers for Hindi, Gujarati, Telegu, et al. We'll get one more country added to the culture wars, and local resentment against foreigners
Instead, build offices in different Indian cities for employees based in various places, so that they need not relocate. Even in the above story, Bangalore is already too congested, so Google would be better off building different campuses in other cities as well, such as Pune, Noida, Chennai, Kolkata and so on
They don't care about Americans or Europeans (Score:2)
Like I said in the article about the fibre internet shortage there are millions of Americans who learned to code and inhertited significant student debt in the process and have the skills that Google needs, yet they just want the cheap labour while rolling in YouTube Premium Subscription money. I'd even say that Google and the Tech industry is racist at this point just this time around it's Indian Supremacy instead of White supremacy.
Re: They don't care about Americans or Europeans (Score:2)
H-1B visas used to require salaries of $60K or more - Trump is bumping that up, but I forget the new number - will unemployed Comp Sci/Programmers work for that pay level? What are all those workers holding out for, $100K/yr jobs?
US universities cranked out tens of thousands of mediocre programmers who are going to be squeezed out of industry by AI tools, not imported programmers.
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That's the other thing. If you don't want to import a population that tends to cluster together and become an attractive target for ICE, it makes more sense to hire those people where they already live, and open offices there. Since more top officials happen to be Indian to begin w/, they're already used to the type of country India is
I can tell you right now (Score:2)
That this shit has been in the works for at least 10 years. It's got nothing to do with trump. I hate the guy as much as anyone else maybe more however this isn't even accelerating the move to India. Every large tech company on the planet has been working on this move because of course they have. Nobody's going to bring somebody here from India with all the costs involved if they can keep them there. You can't compete with india. You cannot compete with someone who literally makes 1/20th what you do and sti
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> That this shit has been in the works for at least 10 years. It's got nothing to do with trump. I hate the guy as much as anyone else maybe more however this isn't even accelerating the move to India. Every large tech company on the planet has been working on this move because of course they have. Nobody's going to bring somebody here from India with all the costs involved if they can keep them there. You can't compete with india. You cannot compete with someone who literally makes 1/20th what you do and still somehow has a middle class life.
Google has 4 large offices in India already. I'm sure those were also Trumps fault too. Companies always had the choice of H1-B slave versus cheaper overseas slave.
No shit (Score:2)
How long until they move their headquarters to India?
Re: No shit (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just the workers that are in India, it's their target market too. Half the worlds population lives in that part of the world..
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Sorry, less than a quarter. World population is 8.3 billion, whereas India's is 1.5 billion
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I'm assuming the OP was referring to the general region, which includes both India and China.
Re: No shit (Score:1)
Yes and Indonesia 4th most populous country
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If so, that would include some other densely populated countries, like Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. India's percentage drops considerably as a result
Re: No shit (Score:2)
Not quite sure how the proximity of programmers to end-users benefits the corporation.
I think this is a good thing, expand opportunities in other countries, Indian engineers and professionals can earn a good income and not have to drag their family half-way around the world to further their careers.
This should worry the state governments where Google currently has large numbers of workers that will be re-sourced back in to India - for example, CA will lose a lot of jobs I suspect...
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Let them go.