Nvidia is moving forward with plans to expand its spaceship-like Silicon Valley headquarters with a third building, the latest real estate expansion the chipmaking giant has made to accommodate its explosive growth streak.
The world’s most valuable company filed plans with the city of Santa Clara to build another massive hexagon near the twin low-slung buildings at the heart of its campus.
Plans call for a nearly 700,000-square-foot, three-story office building at 2348 and 2350 Walsh Ave., in a 10-building business park Nvidia scooped up this year for $123 million as part of an aggressive effort to buy up real estate adjacent to its twin building headquarters at 2788 San Tomas Expressway.
The planned structure would be three stories tall and have three levels of below-grade parking with more than 2,100 stalls. Its quasi-hexagonal design mirrors the "Star Trek"-themed geometry of its current buildings, Endeavor and Starship, an homage to the iconic TV series.
The name of the proposed building, if it has one yet, was not indicated in the filing. But the plans did indicate it would feature a multilayered roof with angled skylight cuts to let in sunlight and a central atrium with multiple “open to below” vertical voids, according to plans filed by the architectural firm Gensler.
Once realized, the new building would span up to 692,634 square feet and connect to Nvidia’s existing campus via a proposed pedestrian bridge traversing Walsh Avenue.
Dealmaking boom
Nvidia, a maker of computer chips that power much of today’s artificial intelligence boom, has continued to grow on multiple real estate fronts.
The company, which has a $4.5 trillion valuation, has spent close to $1 billion over the last year or so acquiring properties near its headquarters to support its dominant role in the fast-growing AI industry. Last year, Nvidia paid $374 million to buy out its landlord and assume ownership of the campus it has occupied since 1998.
The firm struck a deal last December to buy four buildings on San Tomas Expressway plus a parking garage from a real estate firm, The Sobrato Organization, that pioneered the development of tech office campuses across Silicon Valley, including Apple’s first campus in Cupertino.
In May, Nvidia purchased the 10-building office and research park on the 2300 block of Walsh Avenue that is being readied to house its newly expanded headquarters. The company has told investors it expects the AI boom to keep gaining steam in coming years, estimating that global AI infrastructure spending on real estate and other support systems will total as much as $4 trillion by the end of the decade.
It also filed plans in May for a 324,000-square-foot building at nearby 2400 Condesa St. to provide offices, lab space and parking.
This fall, the global chipmaker brought its voracious real estate expansion to San Francisco, where the AI industry has spurred a boom in office leases and much-touted recovery after a dark chapter for the city following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nvidia in November signed a full-floor lease in the city's Mission Rock development, taking over the second floor of the building at 1090 Dr. Maya Angelou Lane. The building is one of several office properties built through a partnership between development giant Tishman Speyer and MLB's San Francisco Giants on the city’s waterfront.
Nvidia has also signed on for new or larger office hubs in Austin, Texas; Beaverton, Oregon; and Toronto, Canada, among other cities. Nvidia has also been scouting for space in the Washington, D.C., area as part of a broader effort to strengthen its government ties.
The company this week was cleared by the Trump administration to export its high-performing chips to China, a deal in which the U.S. government will get a cut of the sales and Nvidia will have access to another source of revenue estimated to generate billions of dollars.
AI buoys leasing momentum
Nvidia's real estate expansion streak in recent years has run alongside the company's chipmaking growth.
The company expanded from a little-known Silicon Valley semiconductor outfit to the world’s most valuable publicly traded company at the forefront of the AI boom in part by investing in companies that depend on its chips. Technology companies like OpenAI, Meta, X.AI, Google and Microsoft all rely on Nvidia’s chips.
Explosive growth across the AI sector, coupled with many companies' emphasis on in-person work, has translated into a procession of office deals that has helped reshape demand dynamics in many pandemic-battered cities.
In San Francisco alone, AI tenants are on the hunt for about 9 million square feet of office space, up from 6.5 million earlier this year, according to JLL. And AI companies have signed upward of 85 leases in San Francisco so far this year, according to data from Cushman & Wakefield, helping to solidify the Bay Area's role as host to the bulk of leasing activity among AI firms.
That demand has trickled elsewhere across the United States amid a broader resurgence of leasing activity among tech companies.
Leasing among tech companies rose by more than 21% through the first quarter of the year compared with the same period in 2024, according to CBRE data, a spike that accounted for just shy of 8 million square feet worth of deals. That activity represented a roughly 16.5% share of total office leasing volume nationally and builds off the momentum tech companies generated last year, when they accounted for about 18% of all U.S. leasing.
By comparison, leasing among tech companies represented a little more than 14% of the total national leasing volume in 2023, according to CBRE.