Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce platform, usually makes headlines on the lines of new offers and sales on a wide range of products it hosts on its site or its consumer and B2B products, but it's different this time. On Wednesday, Amazon inaugurated its largest campus in the world in Hyderabad, bigger than the one it has in Seattle.
Amazon's new campus in the southern part of India is an architectural marvel with all the facilities. It is not like Apple's Campus, but it remains unique in its own ways. The new campus in Hyderabad is the only corporate Amazon has outside of the US.
Amazon campus was inaugurated in the presence of Telangana Home Minister Mohammed Mahmood and Industries and IT Secretary Jayesh Ranjan, Amazon Vice-President Global Real Estate and Facilities Director John Schoettler and Amazon-India Senior Vice-President and Country Manager Amit Agarwal. This just shows the e-commerce giant's commitment to India, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has pledged $5.5 billion for its operations so far.
"We are excited to inaugurate our largest campus building globally here in India at Hyderabad...This new Amazon campus building is a tangible commitment to that long-term thinking and our plans for India," Agarwal said on the occasion.
Here are some interesting facts about Amazon's new campus in Hyderabad:
Amazon's Hyderabad campus has 1.8 million square feet of office space - that could fit 50 Taj Mahals.
Amazon's new campus is spread over 9.5 acres of land.
Amazon's largest office building can accommodate 15,000 employees of its 62,000 workforce in the country, which is three times more than its largest Seattle offices.
The total built-up area will acquire over 68 acres of land when spread out - equivalent to about 65 football fields.
Amazon used 2.5 times more steel than the Eiffel Tower in its campus, measured by weight.
Amazon's new campus was constructed in just 3 years.
An average of 2,000 workers were on site every day for 39 months to construct the building, spending 18 million total man-hours.
There are more than 300 trees with three specimen trees aged over 200 years and there's an 850,000-litre water recycling plant.
The campus has interfaith prayers rooms, mother's room, quiet rooms, unisex restrooms, showers, helipad and 24/7 cafeteria.
The campus is designed to facilitate employees with special needs.
There are 12 office floors, each has a unique theme like music, art, textiles and more.
Employees at the new campus will have a wide range of options for seating and are not required to work at an assigned station.
The office elevators can move 972 people simultaneously, to 290 conference rooms and 3 scrum areas per floor. Interestingly, the high-rise elevators can move at 1 floor per second speed and there are 49 of them.
Amazon's Hyderabad campus is its first facility to create an Alexa Pod.
Despite the unparalleled success, the Hyderabad campus is Amazon's first owned building outside the US. The Seattle HQ is spread across 12 million square feet and only half of it is owned by Amazon.
The new Amazon campus will be a second home to software development engineers, machine learning scientists, product managers, finance execs and more.
Besides Amazon's new campus, the e-commerce giant has more than 3.2 million cubic feet of storage space, 2 sort centres with 100,000 square feet of processing capacity and 90 delivery stations. Hyderabad is also home to Amazon's largest fulfilment centre in India, spread over 400,000 square feet. There are plans to expand it further to 580,000 square feet by next year.
