This information may be out of date, its probably been three or four years since i was there.
But then of course, big companies will do it wrong. I'm reminded of companies moving to places like the D.C. area, where all their clients are in Virginia or Maryland, but go ahead and set up shop in D.C., where nobody from their client locations likes to go. Even better they'll pick one of the few spots in the city without metro access and make it even harder on themselves to do business.
Companies almost need relocation experts for setting up these kinds of remote sites.
As an example, I work in Oslo, and we have offices in Trondheim and Tromso as well due to the universities in those cities. Recruiting people to work in Oslo is quite easy, but almost nobody is willing to move to Trondheim or Tromso unless they were looking to move back there anyway.
The center of gravity also should move. Example, if all CXOs move then there is a chance that office will prosper and people from other parts of country would also move there even if they had no plans earlier.
Quite often I have seen that satellite office don't prosper because the center of action is still at HQ, that translates to freedom of moving between teams, opportunity to work on problems that really matter for the company, etc. Satellite office attracts only those folks who have reasons to be in those cities (usually for personal reasons, very seldom for professional ones).
Only way it can be really effective is if a company moves lock, stock and barrel to a new location - the way Boeing did in early 2000 (moved its HQ from Seattle to Chicago).
Apple, Intel, Disney, and a bunch of others still are.
0. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/dining/pittsburgh-restaura...
It's a delicate balance.
But before you see these companies trying to start a major hub in a university town, there are other large cities that would be more palatable: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Portland are places I would expect to be considered. Even Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte since there's already a fair bit of momentum there, although I suspect them to be a more difficult sell for the same reasons I think Atlanta will have trouble attracting talent.
Atlanta would be somewhat attractive, except that Georgia has just passed their "Religious Freedom" law (i.e. the "We Support Discrimination" law). Tech companies tend to be more liberal and don't like limiting their applicant pool, and setting up shop there would certainly do so.
I'm an Xoogler, and before I quit last summer, our group had been slated to move from the main Mountain View campus to the new "Tech Corners" campus in Sunnyvale[1].
Before Google, I'd worked remote for 15 years, and am working remote again now. About the only thing that made working in the open-office environment tolerable was the feeling of being in the main campus where things were happening. Collaborating with other groups was a 5-10 minute walk or bike ride, rather than a hangout. I went nearly every week to TGIF in Charlies, and I went to a lot of the author talks, and to one off events (like internal job fairs, the MK fair before they got rid of it, GoogleWeen, etc), and use the urgent care clinic. Not to mention that we had zillions of cafes and food trucks to choose from, multiple gyms, multiple TechStops, etc.
Once you're all the way in Sunnyvale, in-person meetings become much more difficult, and the amenities like I mentioned above drop away. At that point, you might as well be in some lower-cost area with cheaper housing and a better commute. Or working remotely :)
[1]The new building was a new-style REWS abomination with impressive public spaces to walk through on the way to totally open offices with no cube walls (as opposed to the 4' walls around the 12 person cubes in the building I was in). So there was a lot of resistance in my group..
Google has offices all over the country, everyone just focuses on MTV as it's the biggest. In the US there are already large offices in Seattle, NYC, and Chicago. They are also expanding in other cities. Boulder CO is building a new building that can house up to 1500 people. In Austin, TX they are leasing 200,000sqft of office space downtown.
There are definite advantages to having all your people on the same project be in the same area. Remote offices are nice and all to attract talent that doesn't want to be in the Bay area, but there are downsides about distributed teams.
I'm not convinced going out of the Valley would be vital for them.
You can have shuttle buses between campuses from when you really need to be in one place, for example
Most perks are only for show anyway. I'd rather not have a dog than bring it to work, or just have time to play with it by commuting a shorter distance
Horses for courses maybe.