Huawei has been releasing products that look similar and inspired by Apple for years. Now, with its new Dongguan headquarters in China, the tech company is setting its sights on something even bigger to clone, all European architecture.
CNBC got a look inside Huawei’s new corporate campus, which is composed of 12 towns named and modeled after European cities. Thus, there’s a Granada area that’s modeled after the design of the city in the south of Spain; a Paris town with Parisian architecture; Verona, Bruges , and Cesky, presumably for Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. There’s also a bridge spanning a lake that divides the campus in half that’s a replica of the Freedom Bridge in Budapest, Hungary, along with a tram station for ferrying employees around the campus.
The idea of copying famous architecture from around the world isn’t exactly new in China. There are also replicas of Paris, London, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, scattered across the country that date back to the 1990s, as this ABC News report shows. But Huawei’s headquarters feel extra odd since it’s the private campus for a major international company.
The headquarters is meant to hold up to 25,000 employees when completed. That’s about half of the employees at Huawei’s Shenzhen headquarters, or about 1/29,680th of the roughly 742 million people who live in Europe.
(via reports of The Verge)
