A year after Swedish giant IKEA opened its first ever store in India in Hyderabad, the city now has the distinction of hosting the largest campus building of global e-commerce giant Amazon in the world, which was inaugurated on Wednesday. With 1.8 million sq feet of office space built over an area of 3 million sq ft, it is not only Amazon's single largest building in the world in terms of area, it is also Amazon's first owned office building globally outside the United States.
Spread over an area of 9.5 acres in Nanakramguda, in the IT hub of Hyderabad, the campus will house over 15,000 employees and was built in a record time, after the foundation was laid in 2016. The facility also has 290 conference rooms, 49 elevators, and a helipad, besides an entire floor dedicated to recreation.
"Amazon laid the foundation stone for the campus building on March 30, 2016. An average of 2,000 workers were on site every day for 39 months to construct the building, spending 18 million man-hours to create a world-class working environment," a press release stated.
Amazon said that the building even has 2.5 times more steel than the Eiffel Tower, measured by weight.
The building was inaugurated by Telangana Home Minister Mohammed Mahmood Ali, Amazon Vice-President Global Real Estate and Facilities Director John Schoettler and Amazon-India Senior Vice-President and Country Manager Amit Agarwal.
"Over the last 15 years we have invested significantly in India across 30 office spaces, the AWS APAC region in Mumbai, 50 fulfilment centres in 13 states as well as hundreds of delivery and sorting centres, creating nearly 200,000 jobs," Amit Agarwal said.
The facility will have the largest employee base outside the US. Schoettler said that the campus was built in a record time of three years. It has interfaith prayer rooms, mother's room, quiet rooms, showers, helipad and an all-day open cafeteria. It's designed to facilitate inclusion and diversity, he added.
Amazon already has its largest fulfilment centre in the country in Hyderabad. Spread over 400,000 sq ft, it's located near the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA) in Shamshabad. The company plans to expand it to 580,000 sq ft by next year.
With this, Amazon now has 4 million sq ft office space at eight centres in Hyderabad, excluding the fulfilment centre.
Amazon, which first started operations in India in 2004 from Hyderabad, also said that the state of Telangana is now home to a third of Amazon's total India employee base.
Amazon has 62,000+ full-time employees in Hyderabad, the largest tech base outside Seattle and approximately 1.55 lakh contract employees work for the company here.
IANS inputs