Alibaba Group Holding has opened a sprawling campus in Hangzhou, its third in the Xixi area of the capital of Zhejiang province, in a sign of the e-commerce firm's commitment to its home city as it grapples with fierce competition and a business restructuring. The new complex, comprising seven buildings spanning nearly 1 million square meters of floor area, has enough office space to accommodate 30,000 employees. The opening coincided with AliDay, when families of employees are invited to visit the company. Alibaba republished on the online forum of Taobao a post written by Co-founder Jack Ma in 2004.“The biggest beneficiaries of a true, great and outstanding e-commerce website should be its users, and its biggest builders should also be its users,” Ma wrote. The campus, which contains smart and green features, a football field and other sports facilities, will serve as Alibaba’s global headquarter. The existing Xixi Area A campus will turn into the headquarters of Taobao, Tmall and other domestic e-commerce businesses, while Xixi Area B will transform into an “open park” for Alibaba’s business partners, the company said.
Alibaba also unveiled a new campus in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, which is expected to house nearly 19,000 employees. In China, shiny office buildings of Big Tech companies often become landmarks in the cities where they are located. Tencent Holdings, for instance, is building a new campus in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, that is nicknamed Penguin City. The headquarters of Sohu, operator of one of the country’s earliest web portals, has drawn artificial intelligence start-ups to Zhongguancun, a Beijing district known as China’s Silicon Valley.
Alibaba has long played an important role in the economy of Hangzhou, where Ma originally hails from. The new headquarters, based on a concept of “green, technological and sustainable”, features smart office systems with cutting-edge technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), according to Alibaba. Employees can scan a QR-code on their desks to adjust the air conditioning, control the lights, and use projectors in conference rooms. The facility is also able to accurately manage energy consumption through a “carbon-reduction brain”, the company said, as reported by the South China Morning Post.
