Silicon Valley Is in a Building Frenzy
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Google's new campus spanning 42 acres in Mountain View is being designed by the architectural firm NBBJ.
Construction on the new headquarters began this week. The campus will consist of about nine rectangular buildings that will total about 1.1 million square feet.
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Apple
Cupertino-based Apple is building a new spaceship-like headquarters, which will be 2.6 billion square feet on a 176- acre campus.
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The iPhone maker's new circular shaped building, dubbed Apple Campus No. 2, is slated to be completed by mid-2016 and will house more than 12,000 employees.
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NVIDIA
The chipmaker NVIDIA said earlier this month that it is also planning to build a new campus near its current home in Santa Clara. The proposed plans for NVIDIA's building resemble that of Apple's future campus, with buildings that look like space crafts.
"The new NVIDIA building will capture the ambition and imagination of our people. It will stand at the intersection of science and art, just as our work in visual computing does," President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in a company blog post. "It will be the symbol, the physical manifestation, of our vision for the company."
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Huang said the building is designed to promote collaboration, a theme that Facebook is also trying to capture in its latest campus expansion.
Facebook is working with architect Frank Gehry, who designed the Guggenheim Museum, on adding a new building to its headquarters. The new structure on Menlo Park campus is described as being one giant open room where 2,800 engineers will be housed.
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"At every step of planning the new building, Frank has taken into account our engineering culture. It will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a company blog post last August. "Just like we do now, everyone will sit out in the open with desks that can be quickly shuffled around as teams form and break apart around projects.
There will also be an underground tunnel to connect the new building with other buildings, Zuckerberg said.
