Huawei just completed its Shanghai Qingpu project and was given the official name of Huawei Lianqiu Lake R&D Center. EE Times China (via machine translation) says this sprawling facility costs over 10 billion Yuan (almost $1.4 billion) and covers 2,600 acres. The company also constructed over 40,000 offices, which is expected to house 35,000 Huawei personnel.
The Lianqiu Lake R&D Center is located about 30 miles West-Southwest of the center of Shanghai, and it’s expected to gather all of Huawei’s research and development efforts, including work on HiSilicon, wireless technologies like 5G-A/6G, Huawei smartphones, automobiles, and digital energy research. The R&D Center is divided into eight districts and will have roads, trains, and elevated overpasses to connect each one to another.
The project started in September 2021 and took the company over three years to complete. Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei said that the company used the Chicago Lakeside Complex as inspiration for the project. He added that the Yangtze River Delta is a beautiful environment suitable for foreigners, where the seven or eight hundred foreign scientists working at Huawei won’t feel like they are in a different country.
The Huawei Lianqiu Lake R&D Center is the highlight of the Xicen Science and Technology Innovation Center, situated in the Yangtze River Delta Integration Demonstration Zone. This is part of China’s push to develop its homegrown technologies as it tries to separate itself from the West.
Huawei needs to strengthen its research and development, especially as it bore the brunt of America’s sanctions in the ongoing chip war between Beijing and Washington. By combining many of its R&D centers into one monolith, the company could streamline its operations and make collaboration between different departments much easier.
This flagship project also shows how much Huawei is investing in future technologies. The Huawei Lianqiu Lake R&D Center is so large that it eclipses the facilities of some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The massive area covered by the project is larger than Apple Park and the Microsoft Redmond Campus combined, which only measure 175 acres and 502 acres, respectively.
Aside from investing in office and real estate, Huawei is also doing its best to attract top talent. Huawei is offering competitive salary packages, especially as it can no longer hire American citizens and green card holders. As other foreign high-tech companies are also slowly being pushed out of China because of U.S. bans and sanctions, the company must now offer deals to attract Chinese talent from abroad and get them back home.
