Google opened its new engineering centre in Kitchener on Thursday, tripling the size of its staff and broadening its presence in one of the world’s great centres for technological talent.
The new company was officially opened by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said Google’s expansion shows that technology and innovation are bright spots in the Canadian economy.
“The reason for my visit today is to highlight that there is tremendous positive news in the Canadian economy,” Trudeau told about 1,000 people who packed the lobby of the restored building.
Trudeau praised the Waterloo Region as an “extraordinary hub” of innovation and said that it represents the Canadian tradition of creating and adopting new technologies to solve problems. It’s a reason for optimism in the Canadian economy, he said.
The stop at the Google building was part of two-day tour of the Toronto-KW corridor that highlighted the role of innovation in the new government’s economic strategy. Trudeau also announced support for water-filtration technology at the University of Waterloo, and pledged $20 million for the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine at the MaRS innovation centre in Toronto.
But Google was the big event. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google first opened its Waterloo-area office 10 years ago with four employees, and for years it grew in the Tannery Hub, best known as the home of Communitech.
About a year ago, the company decided it has outgrown the Tannery and so it restored part of the Breithaupt Block, where it now occupies 185,000 square feet of space.
Today, about 400 Canoodlers (that’s a Canadian Googler) work in the office, including 350 engineers, 60 percent of them graduates of the University of Waterloo.
The office will be Google’s engineering headquarters for Canada, and its occupants will work on a range of products:
- Gmail, especially mobile Gmail;
- Chrome, including the work on Chrome touch, which allows a touch function on laptops and desktops;
- Google Ads;
- OnHub, Google’s new routers for the home;
- And Fiber, a streaming service that the company plans to launch soon in the U.S.
“This is an important expansion story, and it’s not restricted just to Google,” said Sam Sebastian, the Managing Director of Google Canada. “Within a few blocks of where I’m standing, there are more than 1,000 technology companies who call Kitchener-Waterloo home.”
The significance of the new Google office can’t be overstated for the Waterloo area. It is one of several large companies, including Shopify, that have decided to conduct large scale development work in the region to take advantage of the talent coming out of the universities. What’s more, at a time when the Waterloo Region is working to develop links with major corporations, it helps immensely to call one of the world’s biggest tech companies a cornerstone client.
Finally, the restoration of the Breithaupt Block, first opened as a rubber factory in 1902, deepens the architectural character of the city. Like the Tannery and the recently restored headquarters of Vidyard on King Street, the building features the exposed brick and original beams that harken back to the city’s industrial past. The architectural message is clear and becoming pervasive in the city: Kitchener-Waterloo is honouring and remembering its industrial forebears but the cornerstone of its economy is now the knowledge industry companies that have restored these buildings.
