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Google Buys Manhattan Office/Telecom Hub
1sockchuck writes "Google will soon own one of the world's choice pieces of Internet real estate. The company has reportedly signed a contract to buy 111 8th Avenue in New York for an estimated $1.9 billion — or about $250 million more than Google spent to buy YouTube. The building serves as Google's main New York sales office, but is also one of the city's main telecom hotels, housing major data center operations for Digital Realty Trust, Equinix, Telx and dozens of network providers. Google currently has about 500,000 square feet of office space at 111 8th Avenue."
Nothing different, it's always location location location
Haven't heard of real estate prices like this since pre-bubble Tokyo. What's going on here? Are a bunch of fiber cables really that valuable?
Black on slightly-less black is so easy to read.
And the deal still left a portion of the ownership in the original investors' hands, so Google only bought about 89% of the building.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
You must be using Safari. When I view the page in Firefox, it is black text on a white background.
Bigger view of the building built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
I haven't read the details about this deal but some of these numbers are big because they buy things with their own Google company shares/stock which I believe are valued considerably above their yield. Google shares/stock are many multiple times higher in value than equivalent stocks with the same dividends/returns. That's why these figures are so massive...maybe? Is it a cash purchase? YouTube wasn't.
The rest of the world uses the metric_system.
Google is hated in that building by the other tenants and has gotten a bad reputation with the management, so buying the building solves both problems. Looks like nobody's going to be saying NO to Google over at the Old Port Authority Building anymore.
So they are going to be sniffing telecom hubs now days. Or i forget, it's "indexing" when google does it.
For those using sensible units: 6800 USD/m2 or 5000 EUR/m2
Account Manager: your advertising fee is overdue.
Dave (Tenant on xth floor): Sorry, but I thought we had cancelled some of the xwords because we already topped the search results.
Account Manager: I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave.
(Account Manager went to the floor below and pulled the plug.)
My first thought was it must involve high frequency trading.
That's puzzling. Why would Google need high-cost data center space in NYC? They're distributed enough that it doesn't matter. I could see Google buying an office building in Manhattan and filling it with advertising salespeople, but not much hardware needs to be there.
Even for Wall Street, many of the big data centers are elsewhere, usually in New Jersey.
Google bought a building that takes up an entire square city block - 15th - 16th streets, 8th - 9th Ave, in Manhattan. For $1.9B they could probably just write the word GOOGLE in REALLY big letters wrapped around the side of the building (that's only 1 1/2 letters per side) and write it off from their advertising budget.
Years ago my previous employer had equipment in two different datacenters in the building. Its more than real estate, or a massive datacenter. Its a very dense internet peering hub with datacenters and office space. I can definitely see this move as strategic, as it puts Google in the "middle" of all the different players.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
there are about 700 escape them by Distro is done Here OpenBSD, las the
With almost all of its revenue coming from internet ads, what kind of sales team does Google need in Manhattan that warrants $1.9 billion?
Actually Wall St.'s computers are also gathered in Brooklyn.
I just stopped working for Barnes&Noble.com and it was on the 9th floor of this building. BN is centralizing even more of the corporate into that building. Armani North America is in this building. Among other fancy upscale tenants. (all design and corporate for Armani, Armani exchange, etc. also freelanced there a while back) There are literally hundreds of big name companies there. its also a really culturally significant building for its New York history.
Content + Container; Content = Container; Content â Container... which is the question?
I used to work in this building after the World Trade Center 9/11 attack when my company lost their data center and had to rent a co-location space in one of the data centers there. This is a monstrous building that is the size of an entire New York City block. It is build like an ancient Babylonia pyramid with vertical walls and a pyramidal structure on the top floors. It is across the street from the Chelsea Market and one block north of Homestead Steakhouse. The actual entrance for IT geeks to the data center space of this building is in the back on 9th avenue, the office entrance is in the front and I never used that one.
I was bored one day I took a walk down the hallways of some of the floors and saw data center spaces for _all_ of the major telecom and Internet providers that I knew of and many that I didn't know even existed. Strangely some of the doors to these data centers were left open, I'm guessing because work was being performed there and I got a tour of some of these places. Miles and miles of conduits, cables, server cages, telecom equipment racks, server racks, backup units, power distribution units, massive uninterruptable power supplies, glycol-based water cooling pipes, and tons of galvanized steel green field conduits for power lines. This was also the first place where I saw companies replacing the problematic fingerprint based scanners for vain-pattern hand scanners to beef up security. I wish I had more time to check out this amazing building but I was so busy rebuilding our company's servers after WTC that I lived within 4-rows of racks for a few months.
I spent my Christmas and New Years that year rebuilding 250 Compaq ProLiant and ~100 IBM xSeries for my old company to get their infrastructure and application servers back up. I pretty much lived in that building for 3-months and I was lucky to be able to easily walk over to the 14th St & 8th Ave L-train stop to go home late at night or in the morning. It was an interesting experience and I wished that I spent more time there to learn about that goes on in this building.
If there was one place that I know of that is the hidden center of the Internet and Information in New York City I would think that this would be the building. Luckily it was build very solid and it is very nondescript so I think that it is pretty safe. There was a rumor that the FBI had their surveillance office across the street and they had floor space with network taps in that building to be connected to all the important information pathways in NYC.
Data Center Power Off Button Incident
This was also the place where the delivery guy who just finish dropping off more parts was walking out of the data center room and hit the red button on the wall, the door opened, and he walked out. Meanwhile all we heard was a very long and deep "ooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm" sound as every single piece of equipment turned off immedietelly after the Emergency Power Off button was pressed, including the magnetic locks on the door that the guy just walked out of. Surveilence tapes showed us what happened as we stood there in deafening silence and awe unable to comprehend what just happened. The next day there was a plastic box cover over that button.
Who ever though it was a good idea to put the silver door open button next to the red power off button should have been flogged on the spot.
One of the things I don't get about NY is the number of "former X" buildings/spaces. If the Port Authority needed a Bus Terminal (and a huge one at that), doesn't it need one now?
The "former meat-packing district": doesn't meat need to be packed anymore in New York City? Or do people just buy their meat unpacked?
And is everyone in NY just selling ads, suing people, or serving coffee anymore?
Same for all the other "formers".
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1891254&cid=34413838 TheEndOfDays likes stalking and trolling others (as well as starting it up as shown right there)? I like how he was put into his rightful place here in the end http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1891254&cid=34418274 where TheEndOfDays ran like the trolling little coward he really is, unable to back up his trolling and stalking crap. TheEndofDays, it seems that You like starting up hassles, but in the end, you always "eat it", LMAO. Why else did you run like the cowardly little stalking troll you are then? You have no good reasons, but letting you expose yourself for it, now, via the URL above I just put up? That is priceless. As my subject line above says "Check your Brain" per Alice in Chains, rather than your eyes. Our eyes have seen how you like starting up crap and running like the cowardly little know-nothing troll you are.