Google has completed its $1.1 billion deal to hire hardware engineers from HTC.
“I’m delighted that we’ve officially closed our deal with HTC, and are welcoming an incredibly talented team to work on even better and more innovative products in the years to come,” Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of hardware, said in a blog post.
In September, Google agreed to pay the struggling Taiwanese phone maker $1.1 billion in cash to hire certain HTC workers, many of whom were already working with Google on the Pixel line of phones.
The move comes as the search giant is putting greater emphasis on hardware, including phones in its Pixel franchise and voice-assistant speaker Google Home. But Google has a patchy history in phone-company deals. After buying Motorola Mobility five years ago for $12.5 billion, Google turned around two years later and sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion
The official close of the deal also expands Google’s footprint in the Asia by adding a Taiwan office. Taipei will become the largest Google engineering site in the Asia Pacific region.
