June 5, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Search engine giant Google (google.com) announced on Thursday it has signed a lease for 42 acres at the NASA Ames Research Center in California to build a vast office complex that will feature multi-purpose facilities and even employee housing, evocative of the days when large businesses built small towns to accommodate employees. White picket fences and nuclear families optional, of course.
According to reports by the San Francisco Chronicle, the former Naval air station at Moffett Field will be home to around 1.2 million square feet of office and research facilities with child care, fitness, dining, sports and conference centers and will be able to accommodate as many as 5,000 employees.
Under the deal, Google will initially be paying $3.7 million a year to rent to the space agency. The search engine giant's lease is for 40 years with possible extensions to up to 90 years.
The new Google complex will be conveniently located next to the company's current Mountain view headquarters, known as the "Googleplex," and will ensure the company has more than enough room to accommodate its rapid growth and "keep as much of the Silicon Valley workforce close together," says David Radcliffe, Google's VP of real estate and workplace services during an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. Google currently employs around 8,000 workers in Mountain View.
As for the word on a new data center within this immense expansion, considering Google's rapid data center growth over the last year, it seems the company will hold off expanding its footprint here, mainly because the electricity costs of running the facility would be too high in this particular location. Although nobody knows for sure how many data centers Google has, the conventional wisdom is that Google has dozens of data centers, with at least 15 significant facilities, completed or under construction, in the US, and at least another five in Europe.
The Google/NASA agreement has been in negotiations since 2005 and is believed to involve a broader partnership that includes collaborating on research projects involving super computing, information technology and nanotechnology. Currently the two companies have released Planetary Connect, an effort to develop software for scientists to post planetary data online.
Google says construction on the new complex is expected to begin in September 2013 with additional phases going up in 2018 and 2022.
Last week, Google reported it would open access to its widely desired, and previously limited-release, App Engine service to all.
