A courtyard at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus.
Featured Silicon Valley Campus receives ILFI Zero Carbon Certification and IWBI WELL Certification Platinum

Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus achieves major milestones

Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus (SVC) has achieved two significant sustainability recognitions: the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) WELL Certification Platinum for healthy building strategies and the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) Zero Carbon Certification.

These two important recognitions are a testament to our commitment to sustainability, employee experience, and our efforts to create a healthier, more equitable, and sustainable built environment.

The achievements at the Silicon Valley Campus highlight our dedication to creating a work environment where our employees can thrive and innovate,” said Shawn Villaron, Microsoft Bay Area region lead and vice president and general manager, PowerPoint. “These certifications demonstrate our commitment to sustainability leadership and prioritizing the health and wellbeing of our people.” 

Prioritizing employee wellbeing

The WELL Certification is a global rating system developed by IWBI that recognizes buildings designed to support the health and wellbeing of occupants. 

By achieving a Platinum-level WELL Certification, the highest performance category, SVC demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to putting employee health and wellbeing at the center of the employee experience when on site. 

The Silicon Valley Campus includes a three-acre green roof.
The Silicon Valley Campus includes a three-acre green roof, which attracts pollinators and birds to help encourage biodiversity.

By square feet, SVC is the largest building in California, and the largest in the state’s tech sector, to receive WELL Certification Platinum. As part of the certification process, IWBI, through third-party verifications, validates building performance and operational policies in a number of categories that affect health and wellbeing, including air and water quality, light and sound metrics, materials, movement, community, and nourishment.

Some of the steps Microsoft has taken to achieve the certification include responsible food sourcing, offering quarterly wellness events and chef demos, providing certified organic produce as much as possible, offering a work environment that encourages movement with access to fruit trees and recreational facilities, and providing plenty of exposure to daylight with 90% of workstations within 25 feet of a window. Additionally, Microsoft screened all building materials for their human and ecological health impacts.

A focus on our carbon footprint

Developed by ILFI in 2018, the Zero Carbon Certification program establishes a scalable pathway to a climate-positive building sector, helping to reverse climate change. It evaluates, reduces, and offsets both operational and embodied carbon impacts of buildings and fosters the use of carbon-free renewable energy resources.

From the design of SVC to the everyday operations of the campus, Microsoft prioritizes energy efficiency. The building is a cross laminated timber (CLT) structure, which contains the lowest embodied carbon among key structural materials. SVC’s closed-loop, water-based design combines thermal-energy storage tanks and a radiant cooling system that collects water in the evening to cool it down and then reuses the water during the day for air conditioning.

SVC also includes rooftop solar arrays that offset about 20% of the campus’s energy demand. The rest of the energy comes from a utility that uses 100% renewable sources.

“We’ve aligned with leading global certification systems like LEED, WELL, ILFI, and others to develop a set of holistic standards that support our company’s sustainability commitments through the way that we design and build our spaces,” said Baha Sadreddin, global sustainability lead, Global Workplace Services.