New digs for Google.
With over 50,000 employees scattered around the globe and a varied product portfolio that includes everything from browsers to driverless cars, a company like Google needs a lot of space. This week, it emerged that the company has purchased a sizable chunk of land in London, England. According to Reuters, Google, which already has a London office, just recently snapped up a 2.4 acre plot at the Kings Cross Central development.
Billed as one of London's biggest regeneration schemes, Kings Cross Central will soon (okay, not that soon) be home to a 1-million-square-foot Google HQ. Reuters cites a source that says Google is investing a £650 million pounds to buy and develop the site, which will be worth £1 billion when it is finished.
The new headquarters is expected to finished in three years time. At that point, Google will move from its current London office to the new building. Reuters says work on the new building will start later this year and the structure will be between seven and 11 storeys tall.
Google Europe VP Matt Brittin described the investment as a big one for Google. Brittin said Google is committing further to the UK and that the move was good news for Google.
Don't you just hate it when article headlines mislead you like that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre#Equivalence_to_other_units_of_area
(Being British, "football" naturally refers to soccer ;-)
Don't you just hate it when article headlines mislead you like that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acre#Equivalence_to_other_units_of_area
(Being British, "football" naturally refers to soccer ;-)
I'm pretty sure it makes a huge difference.
Sadly I think we're getting to expect it from Tom's. www.bbc.co.uk/news is also riddled with click-seeking headline spin. :-/
From the article:
So Pounds.
The headline is simply incorrect! Go read BBC News, then come back and fix!
I don't think that the writers of the articles write the headlines. Usually that is done by someone else, who is usually in a hurry, usually doesn't really care, and may or may not read past the first sentence.
The Microsoft Campus in Redmond Washington is almost 200 acres, just in building space. LOL!
No its the self-entitled, uneducated people that are causing companies to leave. Most U.S. companies are based in areas with higher taxes and higher average education levels.
An Acre is 43,560 square feet. 2.4 Acres is 104,544 square feet. The building is unlikely to fill the entire lot, it will probably have a sidewalk around it and maybe a small lawn and some driveways. So to allow for that, and also to simplify the math, I'm going to call it 100,000 square feet per floor.
The article says 7 to 11 floors, so approximately 700,000 to 1,100,000 square feet. Plus it will probably have two or three levels of basements.
I think they can do it on a 2.4 acre lot, although my first reaction was this is an insane waste of money. They probably need a small office in London, which they should lease, and they should put the million square foot office building somewhere that land, and everything else, is a lot cheaper
I'm not saying what you wrote it wrong. I liked it ...interesting. And I was already doing some rough calculations. But how can the Burj Khalifa(world's tallest building) at 163 floors ...cost 1.5 billion. That building is humongous! This future Google complex must be on a 24 acre lot. Or your: quote "insane waste of money" is the understatment of the decade!
I agree, that sounds way too small. The math doesn't work. 2.4 acres is 104,544 sq/ft. How can you build a million sq/ft building on that lot under 10 stories? A seven story building that takes up every square inch would be only 731,808 sq/ft. Is google going to build an upside pyramid that overhangs the surrounding streets? The building would have to be a minimum of 10 stories, so you can rule out the options of 7-9 stories in this article.