Apple’s spaceship campus will hold even more employees than previously thought

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What the finished product will look like.
"What is this?! A campus for ants?"
Photo: Apple

The epic scale of Apple’s Campus 2 “spaceship” awed many people when it was first announced — with impressive stats like the fact that it is wider than the Empire State Building is tall, and that it will house 13,000 Apple employees — or the equivalent of 35 fully-stocked Boeing 747 jetliners’ worth of people.

But according to a new report, Apple’s new HQ will now house considerably more than that number of staffers, as Apple aims to bring as many teams under one roof in the name of collaboration.

Bloomberg notes that:

“A committee of Apple managers is working on the plan to reorganize Apple across its current and future locations. Recently that plan has changed, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Apple originally expected up to 13,000 employees at the new campus. Now that number will increase by thousands and Apple is adjusting internal office space accordingly, the person said.”

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The goal of bringing as many people under one roof as possible has been a mission statement for the new campus since day one, although it seems that Apple has doubled-down on that mission statement as of late.

Interestingly, the report also notes that Apple will be repurposing its current Infinite Loop campus to house all its internet service groups — including Siri, Maps, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple News and parts of iTunes and Apple Music — in one place. This is so as to “better compete with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc. in the cloud, according to people familiar with the plans.”

At present, these services divisions are developed  separately from one another in different offices rented out in Cupertino and nearby Sunnyvale.

Apple is also bolstering its cloud computing services, so that software to process Siri requests and Apple Music downloads — are all on a single, Apple-created system, cod-named “Pie.” This will give Apple more control and hopefully help speed up load times for users.

Apple has already started moving parts of Siri, the iTunes Store, and Apple News to the new platform. It plans to move other services, such as Maps over to the system within the next several years.

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