Microsoft keeps growing, here and elsewhere
November 29, 2007
The new international headquarters for Microsoft Research, Building 99, opened earlier this month. It is the first of seven new buildings on Microsoft Corp.’s West Campus in Redmond, Wash., and represents part of the company’s plan to continue expanding in the U.S. and overseas.
The company’s Entertainment and Devices Division will occupy four of the seven new buildings, part of the 1.4 million square feet of West Campus currently under construction. Planned for completion in April 2009, West Campus will feature a central campus commons, offering employees convenient amenities such as a post office, a mini-spa, a bookstore and 12 food venues.
“Continuing to build a world-class campus in Redmond is critical to a company like Microsoft that has innovative people as its greatest asset,” says Chris Liddell, chief financial officer at Microsoft and the executive overseeing the expansion.
Microsoft also announced that it has doubled its space investments to expand its Redmond campus beyond what the company announced in early 2006. At that time, Microsoft unveiled a plan to execute roughly half of its 15- to 20-year development with the City of Redmond by 2009.
Updates to the plan now include an additional 21 leased sites in Bellevue, Wash.; Issaquah, Wash.; Redmond; and Seattle, which will provide a combined total of 5.5 million square feet and the capacity to house approximately 19,000 people based on the current conceptual layout. Microsoft’s original plan called for seven new buildings, seven building acquisitions and two new leases to provide a combined total of 3.1 million square feet.
Microsoft also announced that site planning is currently under way for two new buildings on the former Safeco Corp. headquarters site it acquired in 2006. The company will also begin site planning for the addition of new buildings on the land it acquired from Nintendo of America Inc. earlier this year. Both of these projects are outside the three-year expansion Microsoft began in February 2006. Construction start and end dates for both sites have not yet been set.
Over the next two years, Microsoft will continue plans to dedicate $35 million to significant transportation and infrastructure enhancements in Redmond, including improvements to roads, sewers and an overpass over SR 520. Planned for completion in the fall of 2009, the overpass will connect the east and west sides of campus, allowing for easier traffic flow on campus and in the surrounding communities.
“Microsoft continues to grow at a healthy pace, and this growth means strengthening our physical infrastructures,” said Brad Smith, senior vice president at Microsoft. “We are committed to doing our part to help improve transportation on SR 520 with the goal of facilitating an easier commute for all Puget Sound residents.”
New processing center in Russia
Microsoft employs more than 36,000 in the Puget Sound region, but even more—46,000—globally. Part of Microsoft’s expansion plan is the construction of a new data processing center in the Irkutsk region of Russia. The company will invest about $500 million in the project, and could be just the first of several such centers in the country.
The data center is intended to provide data storage and processing needs for corporations and public institutions, primarily outsourced, and will feature tens of thousands of servers with an overall power consumption of 50 MW.
SOURCES: Microsoft Corp., CNews
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