What is the proximity of this building to Wall Street? I wonder if they are looking to get a foot into the high frequency trading business in some way.
High frequency trading is generally done by colocating servers at the exchange data centers, or another data center with a very low latency link to the exchange's. (The link must be necessarily very short due to the finite speed of light.) You don't need to buy a whole building to do this, and in fact, buying a whole building is unlikely to help.
It's not close to Wall street. This building is where their NYC offices were already located, by buying it, it makes it easy to expand into vacant office space. And, as stated in the article, about 25% of the building is data center space, it is one of the largest carrier hotels in NYC.
That's closer in "speed of light" to Wall St than the Newark / Jersey City colos, but computer trading tends to be in Jersey so that's where you'd go if wire speed is your goal.
Try 165 Halsey St in Newark. Here's a map of who is already on each floor. Morgan Stanley has the entire 2nd floor:
Yup, in Mahwah area, up Route 17 near the NY border. The NYSE built a massive data center there specifically for colocation of high frequency trading operations, even going so far as ensuring each customers switch runs are the same length. It was on 60:Minutes a while ago.
The main NJ data centers for exchanges include Secaucus (Equinix NY4), Weehawken (Savvis), Clifton (Telx), and now Mahwah. All of the major stock exchanges and some of the options exchanges are in one of these data centers.
If I've left any out, please feel free to add as a comment.
