When NVIDIA announced plans in early 2013 that it would build a new, one million-square-foot campus in Santa Clara, its ambitious project was announced as an architectural wonder. The two buildings, designed in a triangular shape had only two floors, each with massive, 250,000 square-foot floor plates. The company’s co-founder, President and Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang had personally been involved in the design and wanted to make the building all about connectivity.
“We are starting with the most efficient geometry for the most people to connect in a day, and a triangle is creating the shortest travel distance,” said Jeff Birdwell, president of commercial development at Sares Regis Group of Northern California at the time, which was hired to lead the development of the buildings.
But two years later, the development plans and teams changed. The Gensler-designed project was halved to include just one of the two buildings. The company that was initially slated to build the project, Webcor Builders, was replaced by Matt Construction, which itself was replaced by Milpitas-based Devcon Construction. According to NVIDIA’s blog post at the time, after design and cost considerations were optimized, the company was ready to embark on the development, or half of it to be more precise.
Now, after successfully finalizing the development of the first building, the company is ready to tackle the second and third phases of the project, but with slight changes. According to a report by the San Jose Mercury News, NVIDIA, flush with profits from a couple of successful years, is looking at bumping up the second building by as much as 50 percent, from 500,000 square feet to 750,000 square feet. This would be accomplished by adding a third, 250,000 square-foot floor plate to the second building.
The company also offered additional insight into its real estate work in an SEC filing at the end of February 2018. “In January 2018, we exercised the option to terminate the off-balance sheet, build-to-suit operating lease financing arrangement related to our new Santa Clara campus building, and purchased the building for $335 million,” the company stated.
The company was initially permitted by Santa Clara to build as many as 1.95 million square feet of office space on the site, which would leave it roughly half a million square feet of additional space that it could develop in a third building.
