Google Inc is expanding its presence in Los Angeles with the US$120 million purchase of about five hectares of vacant land in the Playa Vista area on the city’s west side.
The parcel is zoned for nearly 84,000m2 of commercial space that could house offices or studios, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday.
The plot is next to a historic hangar where tycoon Howard Hughes built his famous Spruce Goose airplane. Google was also expected to lease the hangar, which recently housed soundstages for movie and television, according to the newspaper.
Los Angeles City Councillor Mike Bonin, who represents the area, said the purchase “brands Playa Vista as the tech and innovation capital of Los Angeles.”
The Mountain View-based tech giant would not detail its plans for the properties.
Last year Microsoft opened a 1,900m2 space in Playa Vista, a neighborhood near major freeways, and Los Angeles International Airport. Facebook has operations nearby, as do other major media companies and ad agencies.
Three years ago, Google opened a campus in Venice, where it leased 10,000m2 in three buildings for about 600 employees. One of those buildings is the famous Binoculars Building, a three-story office on Main Street designed by architect Frank Gehry.
A Google spokeswoman said the company, which typically likes to expand near its existing properties, will continue to rent the 6,400m2 Binoculars Building. Google views the Playa Vista land purchase as a long-term investment and has no particular design in mind for the site, she told the Times.
Google also rents a 12,500m2 video production facility for subsidiary YouTube in a renovated former Hughes building in Playa Vista.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS