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.