Work is well underway on the north side of OSU’s campus for the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex, a three-story, 143,000 square-foot complex which is scheduled to open in late fall 2026.
The complex, funded in part by $50 million gifts from alumni couple Jen-Hsun and Lori Mills Huang and the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation, is designed to be a home for team-based transdisciplinary research and teaching. It will house a powerful supercomputer, and much of the work taking place in the center will focus on AI, climate science, clean water and microelectronics.
Project manager Dustin Sievers says the building’s location in a heavily trafficked part of campus, as well as its purpose as a research hub has meant that the design has focused on ease of accessibility and physical connections to other buildings nearby as well as access to Monroe Avenue, which is a busy and heavily used part of northwest Corvallis.
“The location of the complex means a lot of people will be passing in and out on a daily basis,” Sievers said.
Work began in December 2023. In fall 2024, the incoming electrical services conduits were installed, as well as chilled and heating water lines. “We’ve 3-D modeled everything in the building larger than an inch,” Sievers said. “It takes a massive amount of coordination to make sure all of it fits and is routed correctly and serves what we need in the building.” The exterior brick skin will go up this spring, while the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems will be started inside the building as well.
By late summer 2025, the exterior shell of the building should be complete, with interior work well underway. By the beginning of fall term 2026, the plans are to have the building outfitted and the moving-in process launched. The super computer itself is scheduled to be installed in fall 2026, and the building should be fully operational by early 2027.
Following the completion of the innovation center, Weniger Hall is scheduled for demolition in 2028. The removal of the aged, inefficient and seismically vulnerable Weniger will reduce OSU’s deferred maintenance backlog by $70 million.
Key to the design of the new building are sustainability and resiliency, including a high level of energy efficiency. Sievers said designers were able to massively reduce the building’s original carbon footprint with a variety of efforts, including harnessing the large amount of heat produced by the supercomputer to heat the complex as well as Johnson, Kelley, Plageman and potentially other nearby buildings.
“We will be bringing in chilled water from the chilled water plant in Kelley Engineering, cycle it through the center, and the excess heat from the supercomputer will be put back into heating water which will heat several buildings.”
Sophisticated lab ventilation systems and solar panels on the roof will provide additional energy efficiency.
The center will also utilize many building techniques currently being developed at Oregon State.
“We’re using a lot of natural wood in this building,” Sievers said. “One of our resiliency and sustainability efforts was to use mass plywood panels for columns and beams. Peavy Hall was built with cross laminated timber, which we have in this building, but mass plywood is the next step forward. It’s going to be the first mass timber laboratory in North American that meets rigorous vibration criteria, which will lower the vibration transmitted through the wood structure to enable researchers to do their work on the second and third floors.”
Other building features include a cyber physical playground, an extended reality theater, a water research facility, a seven-bay clean room and a maker space. Researchers and students will be able to build and test machines and devices, utilize massive virtual reality spaces and push the limits of cutting-edge research through the building’s physical design.
“A lot of what we’re trying to put in are things that do not replicate what we have elsewhere, but places we saw were missing on the rest of campus, and enabling us to do research you can’t do elsewhere on campus,” Sievers said.
By Theresa Hogue
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