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Comment by Archelaos | Hacker News Reader

To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.

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I guess it depends on what qualifies as a factory. Azovstal in Mariupol is around 11 km^2 and certainly isn’t the largest in the world.

I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.

I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.

It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...

Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.

Like an image ripped from Blade Runner.

Nah, Blade Runner looks better.

I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell.

Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.

I would be curious to know what chemical compounds that you are smelling. Germany has incredibly strict environmental protection laws. As an aside, the waterfront of Kawasaki, Japan is pretty similar, but not one single company. It looks straight from Factorio.

I hope you appreciate how nice it is that you can reasonably assume that whatever you're smelling isn't particularly toxic.

It will be 50 sq. km by the time the extension is finished [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1859149340897628545

The wording is confusing, but I believe the Zhengzhou International Land Port is 50sqkm, not the factory. That also fits the numbers they're giving [1]: "Zhengzhou International Land Port Project announced ——total area of around 50 square kilometers", and that includes a lot of "open-air warehouse" (parking lot). It's still massive, but not quite as crazy.

1: https://www.zzhkgq.gov.cn/2024/01-28/2944537.html

Agreed, the factories clearly aren't the same size as Manhattan.

But as a comparison of scale, both the airports in Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth are larger than Manhattan (27 mi2 or 70 km2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Fort_Worth_Internationa....

While that is a ton of activity (and empty space, if you have ever seen those airports), the Big Apple might not be the best reference for scale.

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