Nearly seven years ago, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that Google had chosen Chicago as a new hub for its finance operations and planned to add hundreds of new jobs to a city workforce that already numbered 1,000.
A little over three years later, in 2022, Google said it would purchase the Thompson Center in the heart of Chicago’s Loop from the state of Illinois and establish a new office at that Helmut Jahn-designed building. The deal with Google marked an improbable rescue for an architecturally significant and generally exciting structure that a few years earlier had been at significant risk of demolition.
Beyond aesthetics and preservation, Google’s move also was a desperately needed jolt of good news for a moribund downtown sapped by the vestiges of the pandemic. Politicians ever since — including Mayor Brandon Johnson, who had nothing to do with the Google deals — have placed Google’s investment in downtown Chicago close to the top of their meager lists of examples of how Chicago’s economy was performing well on their watch.
We retrace all of this recent history because numerous Chicago politicians, including Mayor Johnson, seem to have conveniently forgotten these facts as they now highlight Google as one of the many greedy corporations unwilling to “pay their fair share” to solve the city’s budget woes.
On Monday, as the City Council’s Finance Committee was considering (and eventually rejecting) the mayor’s proposal to tax each Chicago job provided by Google and other large employers at a rate of $21 per month, Budget Committee Chair Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, had this to say to his fellow aldermen: “Are you helping Google out? Or are we going to help grandma?”
So Google’s $280 million investment to overhaul the Thompson Center and shift a publicly owned building occupying much of a downtown city block onto the tax rolls is somehow robbing our seniors? Got it, Ald. Ervin.
Chicago Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, prepares to leave the City Council chamber after Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed head tax was voted down in a committee meeting, Nov. 17, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
During the same committee session, another Johnson ally, Ald. Anthony Quezada, 35th, noted that Google reported net income of $100 billion last year and that it had donated $22 million to President Donald Trump’s planned new ballroom at the White House earlier this year.
What Quezada failed to disclose was that Google made that contribution as part of a legal settlement between its subsidiary, YouTube, and Trump. Trump had sued YouTube for removing him temporarily from the platform after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.
Quezada also bizarrely made Google’s Thompson Center investment sound like something nefarious.
“They’re building a big, massive (local) headquarters,” he said. “They have a lot of money. They can pay a corporate head tax.”
In his budget address last month, the mayor called out Google among a list of tech giants he said should put “more skin in the game” in solving the city’s budget woes.
We’re written before about the self-defeating nature of this continued demonization of corporations employing well over 100,000 people in Chicago. We remain flabbergasted that this administration dismisses the tens of millions of dollars Chicago’s business community has contributed to public-safety initiatives like community violence intervention.
Frankly, it smacks of desperation.
But Google stands out to us precisely because it’s not a long-standing corporate citizen of Chicago like, say, McDonald’s or Walgreens. Why smear such a successful company that has decided Chicago is a big part of its future?
We have no idea what Google’s position is on the head tax. As far as we know, the company hasn’t weighed in publicly. We also don’t know (nor do members of the City Council) just how many people Google eventually will move into the former Thompson Center in 2027 when it’s supposed to be ready for occupancy. In 2022, Google had about 2,000 Chicago workers housed in two buildings in the Fulton Market District west of the Loop. The company hasn’t said how many of those will be moved downtown or detailed its other hiring plans.
But here are some facts about Chicago and its relationship to Big Tech, particularly Google. Google is the only Silicon Valley giant that has made such a substantial commitment to this city. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal suggested that the so-called “Magnificent Seven” of tech stocks has now shrunk to the “Magnificent Three”: Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet, the Google parent. Just in case someone at City Hall is questioning their importance to our city.
For the record, we’ve not seen Nvidia knocking on many Chicago doors. The closest regional office is in Champaign.
Google didn’t have to invest so significantly here. From corporate giants to midsize manufacturers and distributors, there always are alternative options for business location, and progressive politicians — especially the mayor — consistently fail to comprehend that even great cities like Chicago exist in a competitive landscape.
In trying to score points with Chicagoans understandably frustrated by the financial state of the city, the officeholders choosing to verbally trash the one Big Tech player that has planted a significant flag here in order to force through an unpopular agenda is … well … stupid. There’s really no other way to put it.
Google bet big on Chicago while the mayor was Emanuel, who placed a high priority on showcasing the city as business-friendly. Emanuel understood that Chicago only could ultimately surmount its immense fiscal challenges through economic growth.
What does Google think of its wager now? We’d surely love to hear, but we have a strong suspicion the view from the Mountain View, California, headquarters of Google parent Alphabet has changed some in the intervening years.
More important, we’d bet that some of its hiring decisions are still live and in process. Anyone with a clue can see what needs to be done.
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