Feb 10, 2006, 20:16 GMT
San Francisco - Microsoft Corp. will spend 1 billion dollars on a massive expansion of its headquarters near Seattle, adding enough space to accommodate 12,000 extra workers, a newspaper said Friday.
The plan calls for building or buying 14 new buildings and would result in one of the world's largest corporate campuses, the Seattle Times reported.
The software giant originally planned to implement the project over 10 to 20 years, but has now decided to speed it up and complete at least half of it within three years, amounting to some 300,000 square metres of new office space.
Microsoft employs some 30,000 people in the Seattle area and about 63,500 worldwide. The company says it plans to add another 4,000 to 5,000 workers worldwide during the current fiscal year, most of them in the Seattle area.
Analysts said the aggressive spending plan represents a new-found urgency to develop new products to better compete with the likes of Google.
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