Recent articles in the Seattle Times (here) and the New York Times (here) cover Google’s Tuesday announcement that it would build two additional buildings at its Kirkland complex, providing space for an additional 1,000 employees. Currently Google has more than 1,000 employees in the region, with 60% in Kirkland and 40% Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.

The announcement highlights the region’s growing cloud computing cluster. Amazon is the pioneer and leader in this emerging industry with Amazon Web Services, while Microsoft offers its competing Windows Azure platform. Last year, “ownership” of Google’s cloud-computing platform was transferred to the team in Kirkland. The ability to tap a local labor force with skills in cloud computing was a key to that decision. The New York Times story notes,

Google plans a major recruiting effort to increase its Seattle-area engineering staff by as much as five times. There is already fierce competition among tech companies for talented engineers, and many of those with skills in cloud computing work at Google’s rivals in Seattle.

In light of Google’s desire to poach employees from Amazon, I find it somewhat surprising that it chose to place the new space in Kirkland rather than in Fremont or South Lake Union, which would have been closer to where Amazon employees currently work. Perhaps the decision was based on the preferences of those that it hopes to recruit. The Seattle Times reporter was told by a Google software engineer that the company’s “Kirkland campus tends to have older, more family-oriented employees while Fremont attracts more young employees and recent graduates.”