Google Is Really Getting Into Miami Lately

Google only has a small office in Miami, but it’s gotten way bigger over the course of this year—four times bigger, according to Bloomberg. Google says it has been in Miami in some capacity since 2016, but the current office opened in 2024, and it appears to have just been one suite, suite 901, in a huge office tower in Miami’s financial district at 1450 Brickell Ave. Judging from what few images of the interior are easily available online, it was not exactly bustling or especially high tech when it opened, and looked nothing like the sprawling Googleplex corporate campus in Mountain View, CA. The majority of the job openings listed for the Miami office are in sales, service, and support. But with four times as much space, that could be changing soon. And according to anonymous knowledgeable parties who spoke to Bloomberg, the need for additional space “was partially driven by the co-founders recent residential real estate purchases,” as Bloomberg put it. Larry Page, one of the two centibillionaire Google founders who recently relocated from California to ginormous homes in Florida, did so with ostentatious timing—sparing himself from having 5% of his vast fortune to taxed away by a new California law, which Californians haven’t even voted on yet by the way. Page has reportedly paid upwards of $173 million for two ginormous homes in the Miami area, one of which has 13 bedrooms while the other has seven. Page moved his LLCs out of California as well, though mostly to reincorporate in Delaware, although at least one lists a primary address in Florida, according to Business Insider. The other Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, bought a seven-bedroom Miami home, but will probably still have to pay the tax if it goes through. According to the New York Times, Brin hates the tax idea and has a Donald Trump-loving girlfriend who goes around flashing a photo of him wearing a MAGA hat. At the White House ten months ago Brin sat directly across from that notable Floridian. A May article for the Wall Street Journal’s real estate section described the current economic trends in Miami this way: “The new economic order is squeezing out the middle. The growing ranks of the affluent fuel the area’s economy with avid consumption and fuller tax coffers. At the lower end are the retail, hospitality and construction workers who service them but are finding it increasingly difficult to stay. While the city of Miami itself continues to grow slowly, the broader county population is declining.” Floridians like Secretary of State Marco Rubio are well represented in the Trump administration. That administration conducted at least one entire major military operation from a second Situation Room housed within the President’s Miami area residence, Mar-A-Lago. That operation reportedly made heavy use of AI. Google, for its part, once had a corporate pledge not to use AI for weapons, but it removed that last year, according to Business Insider. (A spokesperson told Insider, however, that Google is still committed “to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight.”) But do Brin and Page actually work from this expanded Miami office? There’s good reason to think they do, or at least will. Brin is reportedly still a wiz at software engineering, and works on Google’s AI projects. Demis Hassabis, head of Deepmind, says Brin is “in the weeds” with programing, and that Page is actively involved in Gemini-related work, though in a more strategic capacity. Anyway, enjoy your new hometown, Sergey and Larry!