Google halts 80-acre San Jose campus due to economic slowdown: Report

Google has stopped the construction of its proposed 80-acre campus in San Jose, California, after the first demolition phase, CNBC reported. 

According to the report, Google has no plans to revive the project in the near future. 

Google secured approval to build an 80-acre campus in California's San Jose which was to include office space, housing units, and public parks. The campus was to have 7.3 million square feet of office space. 

Google's parent company Alphabet's revenue and profits were below expectations due to the volatile economic climate that negatively affected its advertising business in the last quarter of 2020. 

According to the report the project has been halted with no further communication on when work will be resumed.

Google will be announcing its financial results for the latest quarter next week. 

Recently, Alphabet implemented major cost-cutting measures, including laying off 12,000 employees representing nearly 6 per cent of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth after headcount swelled before and during the Covid pandemic.
 

According to experts, most tech companies overspent as the demand for online services peaked during the pandemic and failed to foresee and prepare for the slowdown.

With the advent of the AI-enabled search engine ChatGPT, a chatbot supported by Microsoft, Google's commonly used search engine is facing competition.

Google also introduced its own AI chatbot called Bard recently. It is open for use to people US and UK for now.