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Huawei is now cloning Europe

Huawei is now cloning Europe

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Why stop at just copying AirPods?

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Huawei’s new European-inspired headquarters in Dongguan, China.
Huawei’s new European-inspired headquarters in Dongguan, China.
Photo by Arjun Kharpal / CNBC

Huawei has been releasing products that look heavily inspired by those from Apple for years. Now, with its new Dongguan headquarters in China, the tech company is setting its sights on something even bigger to clone: all European architecture.

CNBC got a look inside Huawei’s new corporate campus, which is composed of 12 “towns” named and modeled after European cities. Thus, there’s a Granada area that’s modeled after the design of the city in the south of Spain; a Paris town with Parisian architecture; Verona (for Italian design); Bruges (Belgium); and Cesky, presumably for Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. There’s also a bridge spanning a lake that divides the campus in half that’s a replica of the Freedom Bridge in Budapest, Hungary, along with a tram station for ferrying employees around the campus (sort of like a miniature Eurail).

The idea of copying famous architecture from around the world isn’t exactly new in China. There are also replicas of Paris, London, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, scattered across the country that date back to the 1990s, as this ABC News report shows. (The United States isn’t exactly immune to this, either. Look at Las Vegas, for example.) But Huawei’s headquarters feel extra odd since it’s the private campus for a major international company.

The headquarters is meant to hold up to 25,000 employees when completed. (Currently, only eight of the 12 areas are finished.) That’s about half of the employees at Huawei’s Shenzhen headquarters, or about 1/29,680th of the roughly 742 million people who live in Europe.