Amazon unveils its largest campus in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: The US-based e-commerce giant Amazon launched its world's second-largest campus outside the United States on Wednesday in Hyderabad. The new campus, which is located in the IT hub of Gachibowli, is spread across 9.5 acres with 15,000 work points. The facility also consists of 290 conference rooms, 49 elevators and a helipad and an entire floor for recreational activities of employees and staff.

The new campus will manage back-end operations for the company’s global business and technology teams. Amazon’s new Hyderabad campus is their first owned campus outside the USA. The construction of the new facility started about three years ago. Amazon's largest facility in Hyderabad was inaugurated by Home Minister Mahmood Ali and Principal Secretary (IT) Jayesh Ranjan.

With 15,000 work points across 1.8 million square feet in office space, built on 3 million square feet of construction area, this is Amazon’s single largest building in the world in terms of total area. The infrastructure has been developed in adherence to Amazon’s exacting standards, designed to facilitate inclusion of employees with special needs and support its diverse workforce.

With three amenity floors and 12 office floors, each level has a specific theme assigned to it, including crafts, music, art, textiles and such like. It is also Amazon’s first facility to create an Alexa Pod and experiment the Inside Day 1 Alexa Skill (Beta).

According to the IT secretary, Amazon has constructed a very green building along with energy efficient features. The 10 acres land where the building has been constructed also had many trees but instead of cutting those trees they relocated all the trees to their campus including 300-year-old to 400-year-old trees.

While speaking to Newsmeter, Principal Secretary (IT) Mr Jayesh Ranjan said, “This is a very important day for us. If we look at it, all the places like Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurgaon and Bangalore, typically the IT companies including MNCs, they only take space on rent or lease to run their offices but what Amazon has done is totally different as they have taken 10 acres land from us and had invested almost Rs 500 crore to construct this huge and beautiful building in Hyderabad.”

“If someone is buying land and spending Rs 500 crore to build a building that means their engagement with the city or with the state will be forever and that gives a strong market signal. If Amazon has chosen to develop a perpetual bond with Hyderabad then it obviously means that there is something special in Hyderabad or something unique about our city and this message is really important,” Mr Ranjan said.

“Tomorrow when new companies come to Hyderabad, we should have to tell what Amazon has spent in our city and it sells Hyderabad like anything and no one can now question about the talent in Hyderabad or what is there in Hyderabad. The single decision of Amazon choosing Hyderabad answers all the questions. For logistics, Hyderabad remains the important purpose for Amazon but the new campus is pure a technology centre,” he further said.

“Technically, all these companies prefer to give majority of the jobs to the local candidates because of the employees sentiments remains very high and some amount of jobs will be given to outsiders as well but of course it will be an equal mix of 40 to 50 percent to Telangana candidates and 40-50 percent to outsiders. Obviously, this is a very positive development in the state,” Jayesh Ranjan claimed.