“Pretty strong demonstration that Apple’s not shipping American jobs overseas.”
Apple USA is mostly a marketing arm. How many real tech people will be working there at that donut which you can see is not built high? Prolly no more than what Apple has been employing the last ten years. Most Apple tech in all its aspects is done in China and Taiwan.
Does Apple own any factories? No. It always sub-contracts out.
The actual capacity for workers there at donutville does not look very large. The place is more of a greenie architectural statement plus Apple having a billion dollars to blow. The center will be greenery. If they have any smarts they will put in a fruit orchard and vegetable gardens for the worker-drones
Some corrections though. that building might look small, but you are underestimating the scale. It is 2.8 million square feet, 4 stories, and they plan to have 12-13,000 employees on site. It will mostly be technology and engineers. They'll do all the software engineering, hardware engineering, data, mapping, etc. They have about 20,000 tech employees at sites around Cupertino and Sunnyvale now - that excludes Store and support types.