NC gives Apple 4 additional years to meet hiring, investment goals for RTP campus
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- State grants Apple a four-year extension to meet RTP hiring and investment.
- Apple paused campus construction, houses employees in leased Raleigh offices.
- Original 2021 deal tied up to $845M in tax breaks; Apple added about 600 local jobs.
North Carolina has backed Apple’s plans to postpone its hiring and investment goals that earned the company hundreds of millions in state incentives to build a corporate campus in Research Triangle Park.
The Economic Investment Committee, the state board that approved the incentives in 2021, agreed to a four-year project extension Tuesday, at Apple’s request.
In April 2021, Apple committed to investing $1 billion in North Carolina over the coming 10 years: $448 million to expand its data center in Catawba County and $552 million to construct a new 3,000-worker corporate campus in RTP, near Morrisville and Cary. In return, the state offered a special “transformative” grant that could deliver Apple up to $845 million in tax benefits if it reached certain annual hiring and investment targets.
Apple has not begun building its RTP campus. In June 2024, the company confirmed it would pause its plans for four years and negotiate with North Carolina officials to rework its state agreement. In a statement at the time, Apple wrote it was still “looking forward to developing our new campus in the coming years” and noted it has added around 600 positions in the Raleigh area since 2021.
On Tuesday, the Economic Investment Committee approved the company’s request to delay the grant requirements four years. Until recently, North Carolina could only extend a job development investment grant agreement up to 24 months if a company misses its hiring and spending goals. Then in June, the state included a law within a broad disaster relief and budgetary bill that allows transformative grants to be reset if the recipient employer already has at least 1,000 employees in the state and hasn’t yet received any payments through its initial incentive.
While the bill did not mention Apple, lawmakers appear to have written it with the company’s desired extension in mind. Apple is one of the rare companies to have ever received a state transformative grant, which offers longer terms and greater potential tax benefits than North Carolina’s traditional business incentives. To qualify, employers must commit to create at least 3,000 jobs and investment a minimum of $1 billion.
The state’s initial deal with Apple created parallel timelines for the Cupertino tech giant — one for hiring; the other for building. Apple originally pledged to create 378 Triangle-area jobs by the end of 2024 and 990 local jobs by the end of this year. Its hiring requirement scales to at least 2,700 positions by 2031, which is also the year by which Apple must spend at least half a billion dollars on a Wake County site.
Under its reset incentive, 2027 will count as the first year Apple must reach its hiring commitments in Wake County. Apple has previously said employees at its future Wake County campus would focus on “machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering and other related fields.”
Apple’s RTP building plans
Site plans filed in the summer of 2023 showed Apple’s projected RTP campus would include three office buildings, three accessory buildings and a parking garage — totaling nearly 900,000 square feet on either side of N.C. 540.
While it has waited to build, Apple has housed local employees at leased office space on MetLife’s Global Technology Campus in Cary. The company also leases a four-story, 139,000-square-foot building on Slater Road in South Durham, near Raleigh-Durham International Airport, once occupied by the global biotech company Biogen.
It has labeled its MetLife office “Raleigh 1” and its Slater Road office “Raleigh 2.”
Apple is currently the world’s second-most valuable company behind the chipmaker Nvidia. It entered Tuesday with a market capitalization above $4 trillion, nearly double from when Apple first unveiled its RTP campus plans. Since 2021, the company has grown its global workforce from 154,000 to 166,000 full-time employees, Apple’s annual public filings show.
In February, Apple announced it would invest $500 billion in the United States over the next four years, its biggest spending commitment ever, including on future facilities in Michigan and Texas. But though the company cited North Carolina, the iPhone maker did not make clear whether it had made any new pledges in the Tar Heel State.
News & Observer reporter Richard Stradling contributed to this story.
This story was originally published November 25, 2025 at 11:48 AM.
