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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

> “When the request came to us, I was almost jumping up and down,” says Dr. Irfan Essa, a principal research scientist at Google DeepMind and director of its Atlanta lab.

Wait, what? When did Google DeepMind open an Atlanta office? That seems like a news story in and of itself... maybe I’ve been under a rock the last few years.

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Not sure about DeepMind specifically, but I did find this blog post from 2022 about the opening of their new office in Atlanta. They mention that Google has been in Atlanta for more than 20 years, which in the context of their new office announcement leads me to believe that they have had an Atlanta presence of some kind since then, but whether that is an office or data center or some other kind of facility, I can’t say.

https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/atla...

In this blog post from 2013, they refer to receiving ISO 50001 certification for an already existing data center in Douglas County, which is apparently considered part of the Atlanta metro area.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/environment/pushing...

To your point about Google DeepMind’s Atlanta location’s history, I asked Google Gemini, since I assumed it might have tuning specifically for Google info. According to Gemini, Google Brain had offices in Atlanta, while DeepMind did not pre-merger.

Here’s a list of all their locations I found:

https://about.google/company-info/locations/

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