News: Apple Wants to Build New Campus

As if it weren’t enough to introduce iCloud on Monday, yesterday Apple CEO Steve Jobs went before the Cupertino City Council to talk about plans for a new, 12,000 employee campus that would be a little less than a mile from the current one in the area previously occupied by Hewlett-Packard.

Apple purchased the facilities last year, rounding out the total available acreage to about 150 acres. As of right now, One Infinite Loop holds about 2,600 employees, meaning that Apple has had to find facilities in the area to house other departments. The new facility will be a round “doughnut” that looks more like a UFO than the headquarters of a major corporation. Some interesting things to note are that parking will be underground, it will produce its own electricity via natural gas and use the grid as backup power, and there will be 80% landscaping (the current campus is only 20%). There would also be about 6,000 trees.

Steve Jobs was in keynote mode:

It’s a pretty amazing building. It’s a little like a spaceship landed. It’s got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle…It’s a circle. It’s curved all the way around. If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something. There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It’s all curved. We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building…It’s pretty cool.

This and more can be seen in the video from the meeting: