Thursday, March 28, 2024

Google’s peculiar floating barge meets its maker

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Remember Google’s mysterious floating barge? Well, you probably won’t for much longer, because it’s met an untimely end. According to the Portland Press Herald, the search giant no longer has a use for the iconic four-story structure, so it’s been sold to an anonymous “international barging company” and will be broken down for scrap. It’s a rather damp end for the barge, which was set to become a high-tech showroom for inventions like Glass, self-driving cars and other top-secret inventions from Google’s X lab, after it first appeared in Portland Harbor late last year. Google’s yet to comment on why it’s no longer interested in hosting tech-centric cocktail parties, but cost is likely the ultimate factor. It paid $400,000 in property taxes alone to moor the barge on the city’s waterfront — then there’s also the small matter of retrofitting its 63 shipping containers into something that Californians would actually want to visit.

[Image credit: Tom Hilton, Flickr]

Filed under: Transportation, Google

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Source: Portland Press Herald

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