IBM is officially joining the ranks of countless major tech companies that are either expanding their footprint in Toronto or calling the city home for the first time as of late.

The Canadian arm of the multinational giant just announced on Monday that it is poised to open a new office right in the heart of the downtown core at 16 York, near Union Station, and will be hiring 500 new employees as a result.

The state-of-the-art space will be decked out with all of the hallmarks of the modern, open concept tech firm: "collaboration spaces" for brainstorming between colleagues and clients, a special "showcase centre" for AI projects and the company's Hybrid Cloud platform, private booths, lounge areas, a COVID-consciosu design, and more.

The new workplace will also merge current staff who work at any of four existing downtown Toronto locations, a move that IBM Canada's president says in a press release will help the company with a "flexible return-to-work" model that will inevitably include a lot of virtual options.

IBM Canada has a new office space in downtown Toronto! To be ready by November, it will support a flexible return-to-workplace model and 500 new hires in the GTA: https://t.co/OGm1lZQEIx

*Image courtesy of Cadillac Fairview#IBMCanada pic.twitter.com/QrzrzqQHaE

— IBM Canada (@IBMCanada) June 21, 2021

The company has been on somwhat of a hiring frenzy across the country so far this year, with thousands of career positions and internships opening up in recent months despite the pandemic. 

The IT talent it's looking for at the new office will help with the IBM Garage program, the IBM Technology unit, and IBM Services, which offers tech consulting for other businesses. IBM Canada will also be holding onto its headquarters that have been a short drive north of the city in Markham, Ontario for decades. 

Toronto has become an increasively attractive hub for heavy-hitters like Google, Tiktok, Netflix, Reddit, DoorDash, Pinterest, Uber, and even Wayfair in recent months, and was last year named the tech centre of Canada and a global hotspot for tech talent.

Financial Times specialist publication fDi Intelligence also just named Toronto the second overall "city of the future" in all of the Americas, coming after only New York and before even San Francisco, where so many of these massive companies started out.