Google suspends construction of its massive Silicon Valley campus due to cost-cutting measures

Google has halted construction of a massive campus in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose as it curbs costs, CNBC reported Friday.

Google’s parent company Alphabet announced at the beginning of this year that it would cut around 12,000 jobs worldwide, citing challenging economic realities.

Alphabet reported lower-than-expected revenue and profit in the final three months of last year as tough economic times cooled its advertising business.

The Internet titan is scheduled to release its latest quarterly earnings numbers next week.

A plot of land in San Jose had been cleared for Google’s “Downtown West” campus, with construction set to begin by the end of this year, according to CNBC.

The report cited unnamed people as saying the project has been suspended and no information has been sent to contractors as to when it might resume.

According to CNBC, the approved plan for the 80-hectare (32-acre) campus included office space, apartments and public parks.

Alphabet’s budget cuts follow a major hiring spree at the height of the coronavirus pandemic at Internet companies, which are struggling to meet demand as people go online for work, school and entertainment.

Analysts have said the tech big guns had previously overextended themselves and saw no slowdown on the horizon.

Google’s world-dominating search engine has come under pressure with the emergence of ChatGPT, a Microsoft-backed chatbot that can generate complex, human-like content in seconds.

Microsoft is using the technology to bolster Bing, a longtime competitor to Google search.

Google recently started letting people in the US and UK test its AI chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues to gradually catch up with Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.

Bard, ChatGPT and other similar AI apps publish essays, poems or computing code on command and have taken the world by storm as the biggest new thing in technology since the iPhone.

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