Huawei’s leafy campus in Wuhan, a research center built for 8,000 workers, is usually bustling with engineers developing everything from laptops and smart TVs to optical chips. But now, the company’s sleek, modern buildings are almost empty.
Wuhan, a manufacturing center 500 miles from Shanghai, has become the epicenter of the deadly coronavirus. The outbreak has paralyzed the city just when smartphone giant Huawei and other big Chinese tech companies were expanding their operations there, interrupting Wuhan’s ambitions to turn itself into a tech research and development powerhouse on par with Beijing or Shenzhen.
