Google is buying one of New York City’s biggest carrier hotels located at 111 8th Ave., according to a Wall Street Journal report. The Internet company has signed a contract to purchase the facility, home to data centers by providers like Telx, Digital Realty Trust and Equinix, as well as numerous network carriers, for about $1.9bn, anonymous sources told WSJ.

At 2.9m sq ft, the property is the fourth largest office building in New York. Its other tenands include Nike, Lifetime, WebMD and Google itself, which occupies about 500,000 sq ft there.

Google’s deal is with a group of sellers that includes the New York State Common Retirement Fund and the real-estate investment company Jamestown and Taconic Investment Partners.

The 15-story building’s owners put it up for sale in November.

Google has been expanding its operations rapidly over the past several months. News of the New York deal comes less than two weeks after Google announced that it had started fitting out two new data centers at existing sites in Lenoir, North Carolina, and Berkeley County, South Carolina.

Each of the sites had a fully functional data center and an adjacent building shell. The company has commenced building out the two empty shells, expecting to bring new data center capacity on the Carolinas online by the end of next year.

In October, Google also announced it would complete building out a $600m data center in Oklahoma, a project that had been on hold since 2007.