Last year’s outbreak in the United States led to a dramatic change in Silicon Valley technology companies, with most employees forced to leave their offices and work from Home instead. As a result, tech companies are moving out of Silicon Valley, where housing prices and living costs are high, to Texas, where housing prices are lower and personal income taxes are not required. Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Dropbox, Pinterest and countless other small tech companies are moving to Texas. The exodus continues in 2021 with another announcement of a Silicon Valley data company moving its headquarters to Austin.
ZDNet Technology News reports that Santa Clara-based Digital Realty has announced that it is moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas, with all 2,000 employees from its Silicon Valley headquarters moving to Austin.
Austin is a technology hub in Texas, where the cost of living is lower than in Silicon Valley, the local business environment is good, technology companies are starting to gather and technology employees are not hard to find, said William Stein, the company’s chief executive officer. He said moving the headquarters to Austin is an investment for the company’s long-term growth, and Austin is well located to meet the needs of the company’s 4,000 users worldwide.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he welcomed Digital Realty’s move to Texas and laid down the gauntlet to California, saying Texas is popular with tech companies because of its lower tax rate than California and lower labor and production costs than Silicon Valley.
The Silicon Valley Business Journal said Austin’s biggest challenge to Silicon Valley is that the local imitation of Silicon Valley’s Silicon Hills, where technology people and companies are beginning to gather and a “technology community” is beginning to form, has become attractive to startups in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and startups moving to the area are not as isolated as they used to be.
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