L.A. hits $1-billion earthquake milestone: 8,000 buildings retrofitted, but some question whether $500-a-barrel price tag is fair Use the force, and you’ll never want to leave. For the first time in the United States, L.A.’s City Hall and the Civic Center have joined together to become one. The two landmarks, the oldest continuously used government building in the country and the most expensive, have been joined together to become a giant data center in anticipation of the city’s impending completion of the L.A. Convention Center on a new site. The project is on track to break ground in the fall of 2010, and will cost around $1.1 billion. What, you may ask, could be the attraction of a data center? Well, it’s big, and it’s not even owned by the city. It’s owned by an organization called the Data Center Corporation of America, which leases it to the city. The Data Center Corporation is a consortium of several large investment bankers; it does some of its own financing. The consortium isn’t big enough, though, to keep abreast of the state of the economy — or the market. But the company’s investors are big on saving money, and on squeezing efficiency from big projects: They’re willing to pay a premium to keep things running smoothly. In the world of big-data centers, it’s a good deal.
Why the California data center may be the biggest in the U.S. – The Wall Street Journal
“The city is paying $500,000 a month for the use of its new data center. While the city paid the initial cost of the project, the city was given a 15-year maintenance contract on which the city is responsible for all costs. The City has been billed nearly $1.1 billion over the same period and will have to pay about $300 million in interest,” said David Wulf, associate vice president of the Office of Economic Development and Enterprise Development, a division of the Mayor’s Office who oversees the Data Center Corporation. “The data center will be a tremendous asset to the greater Los Angeles area and provides an important local economic role.”
New York’s massive data center: What you can see, but not touch – Reuters
New York City has been a poster child for the cost of data centers. The city spent more than $1 billion on its data center in April 2003, after the failure of a previous project in which it invested a