STEVE JOBS HAS attended a city council meeting in Cupertino, California to present his idea for Apple’s ‘spaceship’ HQ.

Not content with announcing Apple’s new iCloud service and new operating systems this week, now he says that he and his architects have come up with a plan to put 12,000 people in one circular building only four storeys high by 2015.

Built on the site of an old Hewlett Packard Computer Systems Division, Jobs is promising that the ‘footprint’ of the building will be as minimal as possible; that the employees will enjoy acres of tress and landscaping and a fitness centre. He says it will be a change from the dozens of “not very good buildings” which currently house his staff.

A cafeteria will house 3,000 people at any one time, and the campus will generate its own power using natural gas. Buses running on bio-diesel fuel will take employees where they need to go, and an auditorium will see Apple making announcements like the one earlier this week on its own doorstep.

Jobs says that Apple wants to stay loyal to Cupertino, from where the company grew “like a weed”. He says the location is special to him because Bill Hewlett of Hewlett Packard gave him his first job when he was 12 or 13 and now he’s building his HQ on an old HP site.

Asked by a city councillor if Apple will be providing free WiFi to the residents of Cupertino, Jobs quickly responded saying that his company is the city’s largest tax payer and said:

If we can get out of paying taxes I’ll be glad to put up a wifi network.