Ground for the new Oracle site in Autin has been broken, according to a Tuesday article in the Austin Business Journal, which was on the spot to take photographs of the event.
Oracle announced late last year that it plans to build a 25-acre campus—its fifth in Austin—on the lakeshore in Southeast Austin. The location, in developing East Riverside corridor at South Lakeshore Boulevard and South Pleasant Valley Road, will be devoted primarily to cloud computing.
The California-based company had also acquired the 295-unit Azul apartment complex, located next to its planned campus, for housing workers, ABJ reported at the time.
In a joint announcement with Austin Mayor Steve Adler and Texas Gov. Greg Abbot in January, the IT giant revealed that it had purchased local company StackEngine and that that that company’s former employees would become part of Oracle Public Cloud, according to RC Wireless News.
Earlier in 2015, Oracle was involved in a controversy over the demolition of the low-income Lakeview Apartments, when tenants were evicted and buildings demolished prior to the sale of the land for inclusion in its 560,000-square-foot campus.
According to the Journal, the project is most likely able to develop more quickly than many other large-scale Austin projects because it qualifies for the city’s Fast-Track Site Plan process.
Oracle had not confirmed the status of the project when ABJ published the story, but the magazine’s website shows several photographs of bulldozers breaking ground.