Albany

The SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering is asking the city of Albany to help it finance its new $200 million ZEN building, which the school says will be used to house a 30,000-square-foot high-security data center for the state in addition to Tech Valley High School and other tenants.

Officials from the NanoCollege presented an application to the Albany Industrial Development Agency on Thursday asking it to issue $186 million in tax-exempt bonds on its behalf to pay for construction and design costs.

The building, which will have 356,000 square feet of space, is scheduled to be completed during the third quarter of 2015.

The NanoCollege has said little about the building until now, but it had to submit detailed plans to the Albany IDA board as part of its request for the bonds.

ZEN stands for Zero Energy Nanotechnology because the building is expected to house much of the NanoCollege's renewable energy and clean-tech research operations and operate as a zero-energy building that generates its own power.

The NanoCollege, which is run by a private nonprofit called Fuller Road Management Corp., has financed its various buildings in a variety of ways, including bonds issued on Wall Street and from banks and other private sources. Fuller Road Management will be responsible for making payments on the IDA bonds, which the city often issues for major private development projects in the city. Fuller Road says it plans to pay off the bonds over 31 years.

Plans submitted by the school show another building known as the NanoFabXX that will sit between ZEN and the existing NanoFabX building housing the Global 450 Consortium, a next generation computer chip factory being set up by the world's largest chip-makers, including Intel, Samsung and GlobalFoundries. NanoFabXX would provide expansion space to the G450C.

ZEN will be the largest single building ever built at the college, although all of the facilities at the 1.3 million-square-foot complex are connected by sky bridges.

More than 3,100 people work for the NanoCollege and hundreds of tenants and research partners, the largest of which is IBM.

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ZEN to energize Nano complex