Apple this week announced that its new 175-acre campus in Cupertino will be called Apple Park and is set to open in April. It will take six months to migrate 12,000 employees to the spaceship-like building, which Apple boasts runs entirely on renewable energy.
Whereas Apple is generally cryptic about the locations of its facilities (the black hole that is Apple public relations, for example, recently failed to reply to our inquiry about its R&D spaces), the company is touting its new centerpiece for all things Mac and iOS. The facility, said to cost as much as $5 billion to construct, has previously been glimpsed mainly via drone fly-bys.
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Apple gushes in its press release about the campus, designed with Foster + Partners: "Envisioned by Steve Jobs as a center for creativity and collaboration, Apple Park is transforming miles of asphalt sprawl into a haven of green space in the heart of the Santa Clara Valley. The campus’ ring-shaped, 2.8 million-square-foot main building is clad entirely in the world’s largest panels of curved glass."
(See video below for more views of Apple Park.)
To honor Jobs's memory, Apple will open the Steve Jobs Theater atop a hill at the campus later this year. It will be a 1,000-seat auditorium within a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder.
Apple Park will include a visitors' center that includes an Apple Store and cafe open to the public. Employees, including those at R&D labs within the facility, will enjoy a 100,000-square foot fitness center.
This by no means marks the end of Apple's building efforts. The company is also said to be starting construction on a $50 million data center (dubbed Project Isabel) in Reno Technology Park in Nevada to support booming iCloud demand, according to Fortune, which was unable to get Apple to comment.
Apple also has been busy opening R&D centers around the world, including in China, India and Japan. Another, focused on Siri, has been revealed to be operating in England.