ORIGINALLY POSTED ON DATA CENTER KNOWLEDGE BY SHARON FISHER ON MAR 18, 2020
One of the more controversial sites making use of Opportunity Zones, a federal tax break intended to encourage development in low-income areas – and being pitched to data center developers and investors – is the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Sparks, a northern Nevada town neighboring Reno.
The site, perhaps more famous for being home to the Tesla Gigafactory, a battery manufacturing plant, is also home to an enormous Switch data center and a construction site for a Google data center; hyperscale data center developer EdgeCore Internet Real Estate has plans for a 1 million-square foot, 225MW campus there. Cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Burns’ company Blockchains, LLC has bought a lot of land in the area to build a community he envisions will be a sort of a high-tech blockchain-based utopia. (Blockchains doesn’t appear to have built anything except a single office building there so far.)
The Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, or TRI, organization said it has received a lot of interest from more potential data center operators because of the existing projects. While some data centers already on the site were built too early to take advantage of the Opportunity Zone program, there is still 68,000 acres of land owned by technology companies that hasn’t been built out, and those companies can potentially take advantage of the program, according to Kris Thompson, a TRI project manager.
