Google will donate office space to the new applied science graduate school of Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Google CEO Larry Page and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the partnership Monday at a news conference at the company’s New York headquarters. Officials from Cornell and the Haifa-based Technion were on hand.
The high-tech firm will be providing 22,000 square feet of space in a temporary arrangement designed to help the school fulfill its promise of beginning classes this fall.
The CornellNYC Tech school, which was announced last December 2011, was the winning bid in an initiative announced by Bloomberg 18 months ago—also at Google headquarters—to foster collaboration between the public and private sectors here. The joint venture between Cornell and the Technion beat a bid by Stanford University, the alma mater of Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
“This is a major step towards the fulfillment of Mayor Bloomberg’s vision to seed the city with entrepreneurs and start-ups,” said Technion president Peretz Lavie.
Citing Google, The New York Times reported that Cornell will be responsible for most of the costs of operating in the Google building and that the program has to be out by the fall of 2017, when the school’s state-of-the-art Roosevelt Island campus is scheduled to open.
Bloomberg noted in the news conference that New York University, IBM and Cisco are partnering on a similar initiative in Brooklyn.
