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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting that Google owns all of 111 8th in NYC. They're slowly not renewing leases for existing tenants and taking over the whole building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue

111 8th is a major internet traffic exchange point. It's also gargantuan, it's 2.9 million square feet and occupies a whole city block.

One of the interesting things about 111 8th is that it was designed for much higher than normal pounds per square foot floor loading. Which means that Google could convert the entire thing to datacenter space if they really wanted to. Already a significant portion of it is conditioned datacenter/telecom space run by tenants.

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And Chelsea Market too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Market

These real estate acquisitions were so large that they explicitly needed to be called out on the quarterly earnings calls to explain why CapEx exploded for that quarter.

Some of the largest colo tenants like Internap already left years ago: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/07/29/inte...

At Google's densities, they would never run a datacenter in Manhattan. POPs, sure, like their peering with https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/16, but that's it.

Internap has never really been relevant as a large scale colo/datacenter provider, if you look at the square footage of their facilities compared to major competition like Equinix and Digital Realty Trust.

They're more of a managed services provider.

I meant tenants in that building.

"The Internap expansion represents approximately 1.3MW of additional critical power in a severely constrained downtown NY market.”

https://www.inap.com/press-release/internap-continues-green-...

That was 34000 sqft. Equinix has 36000.

Edit: they had 75K by the time they left. DRT says they have 110K.

I imagine they're getting decent bang for their buck when hiring in NYC. Really the COL adjusted wages in NYC are some of the lowest for all American tech cities.

...except (at least for Amazon) they pay more in NYC, and of all companies Google doesn't exactly exercise frugality wrt compensation.

If levels.fyi is any indication, Google NYC comp is only marginally lower than SV, if at all.

Why would they care about getting a good bargain in “COL adjusted wages”? Even in NYC there is not a currency exchange Google can go to to turn $100k Florida dollars into $200k New York dollars.

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