Apple is building a $74,163,495 million workout facility at their new campus, according to building permit records from the city of Cupertino.
While Silicon Valley is famous for offering employee perks like shuttles with WiFi and free gourmet meals, spending more money than all but a few companies have ever raised in their lifetime on a fitness center is really taking things to the next level.
At BuildZoom, we’ve created technology to automatically collect and analyze all of the building permits and contractor licenses from across the United States. The $74 million dollar expense for a fitness center definitely jumped out as the most expensive we’ve ever seen on a project that can only be considered an employee perk.
We suppose Apple considers it worthwhile to invest in anything that can make its 41,000 Santa Clara county employees lead better lives–or at least, stay at work longer. And with over $100 billion dollars in cash on its balance sheet, Apple’s probably smart to invest in perks that can attract and retain talent.
The competition for engineering talent in Silicon Valley is fierce and more engine and state-of-the-art facilities like this make a genuine difference. To put it in perspective, with Apple’s revenues headed towards $200 billion, the cost of this gym is just 1/10th of a single days revenue.
In fact, the $74M gym is not even the most expensive building permit on file at the company’s headquarters. For the time being, that title goes to Apple’s $161M “theatre,” which we can only surmise is actually the new event center Apple will use to host major product announcements.
You can see all of the building permits on file for Apple’s new headquarters at https://www.buildzoom.com/property-info/19111-pruneridge-ave-cupertino-ca-95014
Apple may have some good perks, not as many as other tech companies. And there’s no free meal- literally. The cafe may have gourmet meals, but employees have to pay for it c
Do you know if the fitness center has a swimming pool?
I came here to ask the same thing. I’ve also noted from another article via WIRED – there won’t be onsite child care at the new fitness center.