Google parent puts huge campus project on ice
Google has paused construction of a massive campus in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose as it reins in costs, CNBC reported on Friday. Google's parent company Alphabet early this year announced it would cut about 12,000 jobs globally, citing a challenging economic reality. Alphabet reported lower revenue and profit than expected in the final three months of last year as harsh economic times cooled its ad business. The internet titan is scheduled to release its most recent quarterly earnings figures next week. A site in San Jose had been cleared for a Google "Downtown West" campus, with construction to start by the end of this year, according to CNBC. The report cited unnamed people as saying the project was put on pause, with no word sent to contractors regarding when it might resume. An approved plan for the 32 hectare campus included office space, housing units, and public parks, according to CNBC. Alphabet's budget cuts follow a major hiring spree during the height of the coronavirus pandemic by internet companies scrambling to meet demand as people went online for work, school and entertainment. Analysts have said tech's big guns had previously overspent, not seeing a slowdown on the horizon. Google's world-dominating search engine has found itself under pressure with the emergence of ChatGPT, a Microsoft-backed chatbot that can generate elaborate, human-like content in just seconds. Microsoft is using technology to strengthen Bing, a longtime rival to Google search. Google recently began letting people in the United States and Britain test its AI chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues on its gradual path to catch up with Microsoft-backed ChatGPT. Bard, ChatGPT and other similar artificial intelligence apps churn out essays, poems or computing code on command and have taken the world by storm as the biggest new thing in tech since the advent of the iPhone. (AFP)