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Alibaba Cloud opens a new Hangzhou campus the size of Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters

  • Alibaba Cloud’s new 10-building campus covers 2.1 million sq ft in Hangzhou, with 450,000 sq ft of office space
  • The campus highlights the increasing importance of cloud computing for the tech giant as its e-commerce business slows along with the broader economy

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Alibaba Cloud has a new 10-building campus in Hangzhou that is roughly the size of the campus for Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Photo: Shutterstock
Tracy Quin Shanghai
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, has opened a new campus covering an area of 198,200 square metres (2.1 million sq ft) in its home city of Hangzhou, in the latest sign of the Chinese tech giant’s commitment to its booming cloud business.

The new 10-building campus, with a total floor area of 450,000 square metres, is located in the western part of the city, where its futurist landscape spans an area as large as Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. It is also roughly the size of the campus for Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, referred to as the Googleplex, which covers about 2 million sq ft in Mountain View, California.

In a video, Alibaba Cloud highlighted eco-friendly designs used across the campus, including a photovoltaic power generation system, flowerpots made from recycled plastic and high-efficiency, low-energy devices in the on-site coffee shop.

The campus is another reminder of the important role that Alibaba plays in Hangzhou, the provincial capital of eastern Zhejiang province. Entrepreneur Jack Ma started the e-commerce giant there in 1999 in a residential flat, and its local presence has since grown to multiple campuses in different parts of the city.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

The new facilities for its cloud business come as Alibaba pins its hope for future growth on cloud computing. E-commerce services, which have been the company’s bread and butter, have been facing slowing growth as China’s economy also slows and amid fierce competition from rivals and newer market entrants.

Alibaba’s net income fell 50 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter to 22.74 billion yuan (US$3.4 billion), while sales of 205.56 billion yuan were roughly unchanged from the same period the previous year.
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