The Mountain View, Calif.-based company leased a floor in the One Buffalo Heights building at 3663 Washington Ave., the same building that houses the Buffalo Heights H-E-B that opened in 2019. The approximately 12,000-square-foot office will occupy the top floor and be operational early next year.
Google spokesperson Kayla Conti said the new office will focus on sales and will not have any technology workers. There will be new hires for the office, but she would not say how many employees would work there.
Google Cloud Enterprise Sales group sells a variety of products and services to businesses, including its GSuite office productivity package, as well as artificial intelligence and machine-learning services.
Conti said Google already has many large customers in the Houston area, ranging from technology to energy companies.
In May, Google said it would no longer provide artificial intelligence tools to help oil and gas companies pull fossil fuels from the ground. The decision came after a Greenpeace report that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were violating climate change pledges by providing such services to the energy industry.
Google said at the time it would continue to honor existing contracts with energy companies, but didn’t name them. Google did not provide a list of the local companies it serves for this story.
In a statement, Mayor Sylvester Turner said Google’s decision to open an office here “provides further momentum as we build the Silicon Bayou.”
“This step is crucial for the long-term health and resiliency of our city,” Turner said. “The goal is to grow top-paying jobs for residents and new arrivals.”
Although the Google office will not house any tech workers, Susan Davenport, the Greater Houston Partnership’s chief development officer, said luring Google sales effort to Houston is part of the work involved in the city’s desire to build out its tech ecosystem.
“The fact that Google is opening their first office in Houston is a testament to the work we have been doing to build out innovation ecosystem,” Davenport said in a statement. “We are hopeful this will lead to increased engagement between Houston companies and Google, which will lead to an increased presence of the company in Houston as they scale their relationships.”
BKR Memorial, the building’s developer, said it is planning further expansion at the Buffalo Heights District site, which is bordered by Buffalo Bayou Park, South Heights Boulevard, Studemont and Washington Avenue. The development will include additional Class-A office space, residential units, retail and restaurants.
The expansion will be located behind the existing One Buffalo Heights building that now houses H-E-B, according to a BKR spokesperson. She declined to say when construction would begin.
In a release, Google also said it is donating $100,000 through its Google.org philanthropic group to help area families hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 100 local families will receive $1,000 in cash from Google.
The tech giant has had a presence in Texas for 13 years, with 1,550 employees. Most of its operations are in Austin.
The company said in 2019 it would develop a $600 million data center in Midlothian, as well as taking more office space in Austin. The company also has an office in Addison in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
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