[skyebook]

While not cheap, these likely weren't an extravagant expenditure (probably a few hundred thousand each).

This seems like part of the noise of a company trying many different things and cutting their losses when it makes sense. The only real difference is that we don't see many of these other projects because they can fit in a building

[secstate]

From the article, new the barges would have been $4 mil apiece. Even if they got them for a song, that would still put each north of one million, and that's before you buy 64 containers gut them, weld them together and install windows.

Not saying this was a big loss for Google, but it wasn't "a few hundred thousand."