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Comment by alanlewis | Hacker News Reader

Headline is wrong. 2 data points that the article is based on: 1) Google has spent 21 billion dollars on Capital Expenditures since 2006 (presumably gathered from SEC filings) and 2) "Google says the majority of its capital investments are for IT infrastructure, including data enters, servers, and networking equipment." (source unclear)

So, Google has spent at least 10.5 billion on "data centers" since 2006. There are notable disclosed expenditures that are clearly not "data centers" mentioned in the article, including 2 billion spent to purchase NYC office space. Still a huge number, but off by many, many billions.

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Didn't they spend 2 billion buying the 111 Eighth Avenue office in Manhatten at the end of 2010? I believe that is data center realestate.

Why would they put a data center in Manhattan? Don't these things usually go where the space is relatively cheap?

111 8th Ave was already a major carrier hotel (there are several on the Island). And it once _was_ cheap real-estate, before Chelsea became trendy and before it was renovated into one of the most high-tech office facilities on the island. As is, it has more usable square footage than the empire state building.

Latency. Putting things far away from your customers means response time goes up.

True, but populous though Manhattan is, it hardly warrants its own data center. If latency was their prime concern they would build the data center in the middle of the population density. For North East US, a location between NY and Washington DC would make more sense.

It could be for transatlantic latency, but this would just be between the US and European data centers anyways.

In short, no, I don't think latency would be a big deal here. Correct me if I'm wrong.

When you're Google, 10ms makes a difference. In my own personal experience, a decrease of 100ms in my response time results in a 20% increase of traffic.

Latency matters that much.

Yes 10ms does matter, but building a data center in the middle of NY vs 20 miles outside is not going to create anywhere near 10ms latency, its not even going to create 1ms, on the Google network at least. Your cable provider is a far higher source of latency.

Depends on where the Meet-Me centre of the city is - it might even be that building.

111 8th Avenue is one of the main data center hubs in New York, but Google is interested in it primarily for office space rather than connectivity.

It's certainly used as a real google office, it has thousands of googlers in it.

There's a very steep depreciation on this capital spending too. Every year technology gets cheaper, and prior data center CapEx loses value.

Well, building a secure, well-ventilated, extensible, vault with reliable power sources, internet backbones, etc, is mainly an infrastructure cost that won't change year-to-year.

But servers are definitely a loss, that's for sure.

True, and Google's New York building had a very high retail cost too.

My impression of accounting (by no means my strong suit!) is the land doesn't actually get depreciated - it stays on the books at cost forever. I think the buildings and repairs do stay on the balance sheets for a while. The servers themselves, probably less so. If only I had the patience to dig through Google's financial reports. :-)

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