While officials from cities across the U.S. have been lining up to show off their potential to Amazon, hoping the behemoth will choose to locate its second headquarters there, Apple has been quietly vetting potential locations for a new campus.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook met secretly with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper this month to discuss possibly putting a major new customer-service facility in the Raleigh-Durham area, a person familiar with the meeting tells The Wall Street Journal.
The hushed rendezvous was tucked into Cooper’s public agenda, somewhere between delivering Duke University’s commencement address, tweeting from Duke’s basketball stadium and taking selfies with shoppers at an Apple Store.
Apple has had operations in North Carolina since at least 2009 when it announced plans to build a $1 billion data center northwest of Charlotte.
The company’s low key efforts are in direct opposition to Amazon’s approach, but it suits the company that’s so secretive about dropping each new edition of the iPhone.
Since it announced plans in January for the new campus to house technical support staff, Apple has said little about the effort. Cook has limited his public comments, saying during a March TV interview only that Apple wouldn’t be discussing its search because it doesn’t believe in the “beauty contest” approach.
An Amazon-like competition creates “a case where you have one winner and a bunch of losers,” he said, while Apple’s process is designed to avoid “putting people through a ton of work to select one” city. “The best things we can do in business is find the win-win.”
Apple plans to announce its choice this year but hasn’t said how many employees the new facility will have, or where it’s looking except that it won’t be in Texas or California.
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