Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    OFFICE buildings that are being built to house Alibaba’s southern headquarters for its cloud computing business opened for use in Shenzhen yesterday, as it and the district government envisage to build it into a regional Internet industry base.

    Ali Center, containing four buildings, is among the first batch of newly constructed buildings that have been completed on the Houhai land facing Shenzhen Bay, a vast construction site for now that the local government hopes one day to be a headquarters base for big firms and a future technology center similar to Silicon Valley. Dubbed as “the cradle of Shenzhen companies,” the area has seen the rise of nearly 100 local firms.

    The Nanshan district government yesterday designated the Ali Center the district’s Internet industry base, encouraging technology and Internet finance firms to rent floors in one of the four buildings.

    Construction of the Alibaba buildings started in December 2011 and the Hangzhou-based group obtained the land with the promise of setting up a regional headquarters there. At least two-thirds of the office floors are reserved for Alibaba’s own use.

    The largest e-commerce firm in China has decided that the T4 building will be used as a regional headquarters for its cloud computing business, the T1 and T3 buildings will probably be used for Alibaba’s other businesses and the T2 building, the tallest of the four with a total floor area of 30,000 square meters, is set for lease.

    “About 30 percent of the floor area in T2 has been reserved by potential renters, which are mostly established technology and Internet firms,” said Simon Tu, a senior manager with Jones Lang LaSalle’s Shenzhen division, the sole leasing agency for the project.

    “The rent was at 190 yuan (US$29) per square meter per month, and after the first batch of renters sign agreement, we’ll hike the rent by 10 to 15 percent.”

    Built to be an interactive and smart facility, Ali Center now provides some high-tech services to make work and life convenient there, said Wang Tao, a senior manager at Alibaba. The services include a face recognition access control system and cloud printing. Parking, food orders and mail delivery can also be traced through its system.

    Neighboring Ali Center, more than a dozen buildings that will house headquarters for some influential Chinese companies are either planned or under construction. Houhai is not the only area in the city that has the goal of becoming a business center. The city is going to have six more central business districts (CBD) in years to come, including Bao’an CBD and Longgang CBD.