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

– [Adam] At Nvidia's headquarters, the chips that propelled the company to a 2 trillion dollar valuation were used in custom software that helped design this office. – We're using a lot of
their visualization tools to help optimize the daylight
that's coming in here. – We got to test out our
technology on our own project. – [Adam] And beyond powering the program that visualized the office, NVIDIA's chips also served as the inspiration for
these futuristic buildings. – These projects are all
about the soul of Nvidia. – [Adam] So what does the soul of one of the most sought
after places to work look like and how does NVIDIA's space fuel the work, powering the AI revolution? I took a tour and chased
down a robot to find out.

– [Adam] On NVIDIA's campus
in Santa Clara, California, these two buildings are the focus. The 500,000 square foot Endeavor, and the 750,000 square foot Voyager. Yes, those are Star Trek references. An outdoor park connects
these two buildings. – Our triangle motif here
is really a reflection of the origins of the company. 3D graphics were based
originally on drawing triangles. – [Adam] The triangle is everywhere. From windows to walkways, to this corrugated structure. – This is the heart. The heart contains many
of our most active spaces. Reception, conference
rooms, coffee breaks. – [Adam] The heart sits
at the center of Endeavor, which was the first of
the two new buildings to open on campus. In the middle of Voyager, there's this. – We call it the mountain and effect what we did was take that heart and spread it open across
the surface of that mountain. – Got it. The effect of this is that Endeavor feels inwardly focused, whereas Voyager is wide open. – It's like a highrise building
on three and a half floors. – [Adam] But NVIDIA's
goals for the project to foster collaboration
and maximize efficiency for its employees called Nvidians, bring shared purpose
to these two buildings.

– The CEO Jensen was very,
very involved personally with the design here. For them, chip design, it's all about connections. How do you move information
around on a silicon wafer. What they do is they design
the connections first. – [Adam] In Voyager and Endeavor, there are workspaces for
roughly 5,000 Nvidians total. The project's leaders
decided the best layout for connecting workers was an open office. – We always talked about the
ideal way of getting everybody to collaborate to get
everybody in one room, – [Adam] But as anyone who's worked in a big open room knows, noise can be a problem. – I mean, if we're in one
room with 3,500 people, that can be incredibly noisy. – Yeah. – So the shaping of the roof
helps mitigate the sound. The whole thing is faceted.

So the sound as it reflects, it's not reflecting back to you, it's reflecting elsewhere. And behind that, there's
acoustical insulation there. So the sound goes and
gets absorbed by the roof. – [Adam] Nvidia said findings in this MIT study helped
motivate the switch from the cubicle filled
spaces in its older offices to what we see in these newer buildings. – There's a visual connection, even if there's not an audio connection, and that allows, that quicker iteration, allows those deeper relationships that are important to building
a very complex product. – So you're saying, it's not just about giving
employees an opportunity to connect and socialize, but you're saying the actual work that they then do together is better? – Absolutely, yes.

– And that's just by being
able to see one another. – It starts with that. – And unless you never leave a desk, it would be tough to avoid
running into other Nvidians here, especially on the stairs. – So what you see along the
mountain are these cabins and at the very top, that's the bar. – It's a little bit of a
metaphor for the work day. Your first coffee, your second coffee, and now you can have a drink.

(people laughing) I love it. – [Adam] In Voyager alone,
there are 19 staircases, some blazing trails up the mountain. – We have way more stairs than
you need technically to exit. The elevators are pretty tucked away. They're there, yeah. You know, people do need elevators, but it's not front and center, and that's again, something I think that's pretty unique to Nvidia. – [Adam] But NVIDIA's
paths through the office aren't meandering. The hallways that cut through
the heart, for example, provide shortcuts across Endeavor, and this extends outside too. – When we built the second
part of this campus, which is Voyager and the park in between, we connected them at both levels so that the trip between the
two is as short as possible. – [Adam] How short? We tested it. How long do you think it's gonna take us to get from here to Voyager? – Shouldn't take more than two minutes.

– Let's start the timer and go. – How did we do? – Timer stops. We were so close, 2:30. 2:30. 2:30. Maybe we were a little leisurely. Maybe we were looking
at the trees, but 2:30. But getting to meetings and coworkers is only part of optimizing efficiency. Nvidia wanted to create the
ideal working conditions, and this is where NVIDIA's tech 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, you
probably see a lot of renderings that we create, but there's renderings, you know, no matter
how photoreal they are, it's still kind of an illustration of what we think the reality's gonna be. – [Adam] So Nvidia put its chips to work, creating a program that
could, for example, simulate how sun would
pass through the skylights. – If I showed you those
images that we had simulated of a space like this, it looks almost identical to what came out right in terms of what the
feeling of this daylight is.

– [Adam] In total, there are 511 triangular
skylights dotting the ceilings of the two buildings, but not every area is meant to get light. The center of the mountain
is shielded from daylight, because- – Here on this floor, we have large labs. In the past, most of our
lab spaces were carved out of a traditional office building. So it was a conference
room turned into a lab, or a janitor's closet. – [Adam] Nvidia has 42,000
square feet of lab space in Voyager alone. That's more than 15% of the space in the building. Balancing that tech in both
buildings is a lot of green. There's this 80 foot
living wall in Endeavor, and more than 14,000 plants in Voyager. You enter Nvidia's headquarters, a company known for GPUs and powering AI, and the first thing you
see is a huge plant wall. – Yeah. It becomes a relic in some ways if they put their technology up. – [Adam] And these buildings, which are the first ones, the 30-year-old company has ever owned, suggest Nvidia doesn't plan on becoming a relic either.

– We see Apple, Google, Meta, now this, right? They're really designing
buildings for themselves. They've matured to a point where, yeah, they're like a
multi-trillion dollar company. They need spaces like this that really kind of can
take 'em to the next level. – [Adam] Nvidia has room to grow. It could even add a third spaceship. Would you consider using AI in some way? Could it possibly play a
role in a future space? – AI undoubtedly will be part of the construction of that next building. It's an assistant. It extends our reach. – I can only imagine, you know
what the possibilities are if we started design again today, and I would hazard to guess with Nvidia, it would be something we
haven't even thought about. – This is the kind of casual connection that all the designers are hoping for.

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