Inside Nvidia HQ: What a $2T Company’s Office Looks Like | WSJ Open Office

- At Nvidia headquarters, the chips that propelled the

company

to a $2 trillion valuation were used in the custom software that helped design this

office

. - We're using a lot of your visualization tools to help optimize the daylight that comes in here. - We were able to test our technology in our own project. - And beyond driving the program that visualized the

office

, NVIDIA chips also served as inspiration for these futuristic buildings. - These projects have to do with the soul of Nvidia. - So

what

is the lifeblood of one of the most sought after workplaces and how does the NVIDIA space power work and drive the AI ​​revolution?

I took a tour and chased a robot to find out. - On the NVIDIA campus in Santa Clara, California, these two buildings are the focus of attention. The 500,000-square-foot Endeavor and the 750,000-square-foot Voyager. Yes, those are references to Star Trek. An

open

-air park connects these two buildings. - Our triangular motif here is actually a reflection of the

company

's origins. 3D graphics were originally based on drawing triangles. - The triangle is everywhere. From the windows to the walkways, to this undulating structure. - This is the heart. The heart contains many of our most active spaces. Reception, conference rooms, coffee breaks. - The heart is located in the center of Endeavor, which was the first of two new buildings to

open

on campus.

In the middle of Voyager, there's this. - We called it the mountain and

what

we did was take that heart and open it on the surface of that mountain. - I understand. The effect of this is that Endeavor feels focused inward, while Voyager is wide open. - It's like a three and a half story tall building. - But NVIDIA's goals for the project to foster collaboration and maximize the efficiency of its employees called Nvidians bring a shared purpose to these two buildings. - CEO Jensen was very, very personally involved with the design here. For them, chip design is about connections.

How does information move on a silicon wafer? What they do is design the connections first. - On Voyager and Endeavor, there are workspaces for approximately 5000 Nvidians in total. Project leaders decided the best design to connect workers was an open office. - We always talk about the ideal way to get everyone together to have everyone in one room, - But as anyone who has worked in a large open room knows, noise can be a problem. - I mean, if we're in a room with 3,500 people, it can be incredibly loud. - Yes. - The shape of the roof helps mitigate sound.

Everything is faceted. So the sound, as it is reflected, is not reflected back to you, it is reflected somewhere else. And behind that there is acoustic insulation. Then the sound goes and is absorbed by the ceiling. - Nvidia said the findings of this MIT study helped motivate the shift from the cubicle-filled spaces in its older offices to what we see in these newer buildings. - There is a visual connection, even if there is no audio connection, and that allows for that faster iteration, allows for those deeper relationships that are important in building a very complex product. - So you're saying that it's not just about giving employees the opportunity to connect and socialize, but that the actual work they then do together is better? - Absolutely. - And that's just to be able to see each other. - Start with that. -And unless you never leave a desk, it would be hard to avoid running into other Nvidians here, especially on the stairs. - So what you see along the mountain are these cabins and at the top, that's the bar. - It's a kind of metaphor for the working day.

Your first coffee, your second coffee and you can have a drink. (people laughing) I love it. - Only on Voyager there are 19 stairs, some fiery paths that go up the mountain. - We have many more stairs than you technically need to get out. The elevators are quite far away. They are there, yes. You know, people need elevators, but they're not front and center, and that's, again, something that I think is pretty unique to Nvidia. - But NVIDIA's paths through the office are not winding. Corridors through the heart, for example, provide shortcuts through Endeavor, and this extends outwards as well. - When we built the second part of this campus, which is Voyager and the intermediate park, we connected them on both levels so that the trip between them is as short as possible. - What a short?

We tested it. How long do you think it will take us to get from here to Voyager? - It shouldn't take more than two minutes. - Let's start the stopwatch and let's go. - How did we do it? - The stopwatch stops. We were very close, 2:30. 2:30. 2:30. Maybe we were a little calm. Maybe we were looking at the trees, but at 2:30. But reaching out to meetings and co-workers is only part of optimizing efficiency. Nvidia wanted to create ideal working conditions and this is where NVIDIA technology came in. - One of the key principles that Nvidia uses as a company is simulation.

We want to be able to simulate a world before we build it. - We, as architects, probably see a lot of renderings that we create, but there are renderings, you know, no matter how photorealistic they are, they are still a kind of illustration of what we think reality will be. - So Nvidia put its chips to work, creating a program that could, for example, simulate how the sun would pass through skylights. - If I were to show you those images that we had simulated of a space like this, it

looks

almost identical to what went well in terms of what the feel of this daylight is. - In total, there are 511 triangular skylights dotting the roofs of the two buildings, but not all areas are intended to receive light.

The center of the mountain is protected from daylight, because... - Here, on this floor, we have large laboratories. In the past, most of our lab spaces were built in a traditional office building. So it was a conference room converted into a laboratory or a janitor's closet. - Nvidia has 42,000 square feet of lab space on Voyager alone. That's more than 15% of the building's space. Balancing that technology in both buildings is a lot of green. There's an 80-foot living wall on Endeavor and more than 14,000 plants on Voyager. You walk into the headquarters of Nvidia, a company known for GPUs and artificial intelligence, and the first thing you see is a huge plant wall. - Yes.

In a way, it becomes a relic if they incorporate its technology. - And these buildings, which are the first the 30-year-old company has owned, suggest that Nvidia doesn't plan to become a relic either. - We see Apple, Google, Meta, now this, right? They are really designing buildings for themselves. They've matured to a point where, yeah, they're like a multi-billion dollar company. They need spaces like this that can really take them to the next level. - Nvidia has room to grow. You could even add a third spaceship. Would you consider using AI in any way? Could it play a role in a future space? - Without a doubt, AI will be part of the construction of the next building.

He is an assistant. Expand our reach. - I can only imagine, you know what the possibilities are if we started designing again today, and I would venture to guess with Nvidia, it would be something we hadn't even thought about. - This is the kind of casual connection that all designers hope for.