Apple to build $1 billion campus in North Carolina
RALEIGH, N.C. — After more than three years of courting and an initial snub, North Carolina is finally landing an Apple campus.
Apple plans to invest $1 billion in North Carolina over 10 years, including $552 million to establish a campus in Research Triangle Park where it will create at least 3,000 jobs, according to the state Department of Commerce. The company says it will spend another $448 million expanding its data center in Catawba County but not create new jobs there.
The RTP jobs would pay an average of $187,000 a year, according to the commerce department.
The company's decision was announced Monday morning at the monthly meeting of the Economic Investment Committee, which makes decisions about job development grants. The committee approved a jobs grant of $845.8 million over 39 years to Apple.
"North Carolina's competition for the project was primarily Ohio," said Mark Poole at the commerce department. "But there were a number of other states considered."
The Jobs Development Investment Grant award to Apple is the largest in the state's history — more than twice the $387 million awarded to health care company Centene Corp. last summer to create an East Coast headquarters and technology hub in Charlotte.
In addition, $112.4 million from state income taxes paid by Apple's new employees will flow to a utility fund for broadband, roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects in rural communities.
Wake County also offered Apple a business development grant that will pay 50% of new property tax growth back to the company after it has met minimum investment requirements. Normally that grant is good for only eight years, but the county has offered to extend it for 30 years due to the "transformational nature of the project," county spokeswoman Dara Demi said.
The campus will be 1 million square feet on the Wake County side of RTP, on tracts of land straddling N.C. 540 near Cary and Morrisville. It will run on 100% renewable energy, the company said.
Gov. Roy Cooper, state Senate leader Phil Berger, House Speaker Tim Moore and other leaders from both political parties held a rare joint press conference at the Executive Mansion to celebrate the announcement.
"As Apple CEO Tim Cook told me on Saturday, with this announcement Apple is showing that they're not just creating new jobs and building a campus," said Cooper, a Democrat. "They want to be a committed partner with our state for the long-term. I told him that we look forward to that partnership."
Berger, a Republican, said Apple's decision is a result of the state's efforts to improve its business climate.
"There's a reason this transformative project isn't happening somewhere else," Berger said. "We've spent 10 years enacting a responsible budget, lowering taxes and making regulations reasonable. The winning formula for job creation.
"That formula combined with education reform and funding is attractive to job creators, big and small," Berger continued. "Today that job creator happens to be the biggest company in the world."
State Sen. Dan Blue, who represents Wake County, compared Apple's arrival to IBM's decision to come to RTP in the 1960s, establishing the Triangle as a place for other technology companies to settle.