Just hours from Huawei's former headquarters in Shenzhen, China, the company built a new campus in Dongguan City to house 25,000 research and development employees. But it is not an extensive network of glass towers, it is made up of 12 mini-neighborhoods built to look like a different European city, all connected by a large train.
In other words, it's a bit like a Disneyland for tech research.
The famous Walt Disney Park stretches about 0,34 square kilometers, but this research center has an area four times as large and extends over 1,2 square kilometers, which can reach 1,976 acres (8 square kilometers) if it includes factories. close. Lake. Each mini-district, supposedly called "cities" by some Huawei employees, has large buildings, cobblestone or brick streets, and landscaped greenery.
Huawei invited the technical media for an informal tour of the grounds, and LaComparacion took a closer look. We started in a cafe and took the two-car train in a bright orange color with brass accents, as we drove out of industrial-age Europe.
We fly over areas inspired by Paris, Burgundy, Heidelberg, Cesky Krumlov and Bologna, full of "cities" in the shape and arranged like every city, some so large that they can also be castles. It was completely impressive, but not in its place amid the lush Chinese flora and lousy residential skyscrapers in the distance.
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The effect was surreal: a dizzying dissonance between carefully constructed medieval and Renaissance European buildings, which would continue to function as everyday workplaces. All the members of our media group began to look closely, as we took the long orange train past the entire "cities" (seven out of twelve are ready for work, five years after the start of construction) to have a idea of the size of the installation.
We end with the obvious question: why?
"Disneyland" in Huawei's workplace, a new research center
Or to rethink the survey: why not just create a modern glass and grass campus like the other tech titans? Our guide explained the philosophy of the Dongguan factory: Huawei's founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei wanted employees to work in a place that they found peaceful, which is a long way from the metropolitan area. from Shenzhen or Dongguan.
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If this is true, this sentiment, and the resources dedicated to bringing this vision of the city to life, evoke the fantasy and dedication that Walt Disney combined to create Disneyland. "Here, age brings back memories of the past, and here young people can savor the challenge and promise of the future," Disney said at the park's opening in 1955. in a short dedication
Some 60 years later, these words could strangely apply to Huawei's research and development campus in Dongguan.
During our visit, technical means were introduced to the company's myriad of technology applications, ranging from expanding existing industries with 5G to making cities "smart" with enough sensors to monitor energy consumption. , air quality, and even individual container capacities. And yes, simplify the networks behind security camera systems (to aid missing children and crowd control, said a Huawei tour guide), as well as the networks (and sometimes chips) behind recognition software. face.
Of course, the company's technological innovations have not only been brought to Dongguan: this still unfinished facility is one of 16 global R&D centers. Nine of them are located in China, but while the others employ approximately 10,000 people each, the Dongguan facility will house approximately 25,000 once completed, and the R&D contingent accounts for more than half of Huawei's 188,000 Employees.
But these other R&D facilities were not built as a haven for culturally important European cities. It is unclear whether the Dongguan campus was extravagantly built to attract employees or to cater for the eccentric quirks of senior staff (if not Zhengfei himself), or both, or both. What is clear: if this model were built in the United States, it would be highly reproached for a complex and unnecessarily ornate and expensive technical feat, as was the case with Disneyland before the presentation of its detractors.