From the March issue: With at least $4 billion in New York City real estate acquisitions alone — including the $1.77 billion deal for 111 Eighth Avenue in 2010 and the $2.4 billion buy of 75 Ninth Avenue that closed Tuesday — Google is earning a serious reputation as a local property owner and operator.
But the tech giant’s footprint extends far past New York’s Silicon Alley.
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After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in a garage in Menlo Park, California, in 1998, the firm rapidly grew into the multibillion-dollar multinational tech conglomerate. In 2004, the company built a corporate headquarters known as the Googleplex at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. The campus initially spanned 2 million square feet of offices, but it grew to 3.1 million square feet in 2015, when Google restructured to exist under its new parent company, Alphabet.
Apart from its parent company Alphabet’s restructuring, Google now has 74,000 employees worldwide as well as more than 70 offices and 15 data centers in 50 countries, according to the company. And Alphabet’s global real estate assets have an estimated value of $14.5 billion, according to Real Capital Analytics — roughly 30 percent of which is concentrated in its two New York City buildings.
Google’s other known holdings are located across the country, in North Carolina, Michigan and Texas, among other states. The search engine has also been aggressively buying up vacant industrial plots and office buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area in recent years, including an $820 million purchase of 52 buildings in Sunnyvale in July.