Google Acquires Manhattan Datacenter

Whatever financial firms’ policies when it comes to dealing with search giant Google, things are almost certainly about to change. According to various media reports, the Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered behemoth has acquired the complete city block of 111 8th Avenue in Manhattan for a reported $1.8 billion. The monstrous real estate deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

SST Analysis:
For a company known for building bleeding-edge datacenters from scratch, acquiring one of the largest datacenter hosting facilities in Manhattan is huge. Google remains mum on its plans for its purchase, but it's doubtful that the vendor decided to buy it just to eliminate renting space in the facility.

One possible investment Google could make is bringing a portion of its cloud offering closer to clients based in Manhattan. However, speaking with a number of financial technologists, Google tends to fall down the list of preferred cloud providers since it requires applications to be built using Google architecture, which makes application portability to other clouds environments difficult.