Reno/Sparks In The News

In the News

Google’s massive 1,210-acre facility rising in high desert at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center By Jason Hidalgo, Reno Gazette Journal Published on July 31, 2019

Google’s Northern Nevada facility is shaping up to be a large undertaking as construction picks up at the 1,210-acre site inside Tahoe Reno Industrial Center.

Photographs taken by the Reno Gazette Journal on Tuesday show plenty of construction activity at the site on USA Parkway just a few miles south of the Switch Citadel data center campus and Tesla Gigafactory in Storey County.

The frame of a two-story structure surrounded by cranes and other construction equipment can be seen at the site, which Google bought for $29.1 million in April 2017. Google has yet to provide specific details about the facility, which is expected to be a data center.

Google bought the facility as part of a $13 billion investment that the company was making across the United States, including in Nevada. At the time, CEO Sundar Pichai indicated that Google will be making major expansions in 14 states.

“These new investments will give us the capacity to hire tens of thousands of employees, and enable the creation of more than 10,000 new construction jobs in Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia,” Pichai wrote in Google’s official blog. “With this new investment, Google will now have a home in 24 total states, including data centers in 13 communities.”

Google is just the latest in a string of high-profile tech companies to expand into Northern Nevada in the last few years. Apple kickstarted the recent tech movement to the Biggest Little Cityafter picking Reno Technology Park just across TRIC as the site for its new data center in 2012.

The site east of Reno-Sparks has since seen multiple expansions over the years. Apple also wrapped up construction of a downtown Reno warehouse earlier this year, which was a requirement for the company to receive $89 million in tax abatements.

Tesla was the next big name to drop after it picked Northern Nevada in 2014 as the site for the Gigafactory, a joint battery production plant with Panasonic. Switch, meanwhile, finished construction of the world’s largest data center building at TRIC in 2017. Switch also plans to build the largest data center campus on the same location.

A Google representative told the Reno Gazette Journal on Friday that it has no new updates about the facility.

In the News

A Cryptocurrency Millionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in Nevada

A man spent millions on an enormous plot of land near Reno. Now he wants to build a community based on the blockchain technology introduced by Bitcoin. By Nathaniel Popper, New York Times Published on November 1, 2019

STOREY COUNTY, Nev. An enormous plot of land in the Nevada desert — bigger than nearby Reno — has been the subject of local intrigue since a company with no history, Blockchains L.L.C., bought it for $170 million in cash this year.

The man who owns the company, a lawyer and cryptocurrency millionaire named Jeffrey Berns, put on a helmet and climbed into a Polaris off-road vehicle last week to give a tour of the sprawling property and dispel a bit of the mystery.

He imagines a sort of experimental community spread over about a hundred square miles, where houses, schools, commercial districts and production studios will be built. The centerpiece of this giant project will be the blockchain, a new kind of database that was introduced by Bitcoin.

“You see that first range of mountains,” he said, pointing south. “Those mountains are the border of our South Valley. That’s where we’re going to build the high-tech park,” a research campus that would cover hundreds of acres. There are also plans for a college and an e-gaming arena.

As strange — even fantastical — as all this might sound, Mr. Berns’s ambitions fit right into the idiosyncratic world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

The blockchain began as a digital ledger on which all Bitcoin transactions are recorded. Some aficionados have grander plans. They think it could be a new way of taking power back from the institutions they believe are calling all the shots. Mr. Berns was drawn to Nevada by its tax benefits, including the lack of income taxes. And the breadth of his ambitions certainly raises the risk of a boondoggle.

Mr. Berns has managed to win over local officials who are eager for economic development. Nevada’s governor, Brian Sandoval, read a proclamation that named the Blockchains property “Innovation Park” at an event last month where Mr. Berns sat on a panel with the governor and Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla.

Tesla’s Gigafactory in Nevada, which has been described as the largest building in the world, is surrounded by Blockchains’ land. Companies like Google, Apple and Switch also have properties in the industrial park that is surrounded by Mr. Berns’s holdings.

But for now, Blockchains is empty land and a repurposed office building. Mr. Berns said the company won’t begin construction on the broader property until late 2019, at the earliest, after putting together the master plan and getting it approved by the county.

The office manager from Mr. Berns’s old law office in Los Angeles, Joanna Rodriguez, moved with her four children and husband to Nevada.

“He has these crazy ideas — but I know that every time he sets his mind to something he will get there,” said Ms. Rodriguez, 29, who has worked with Mr. Berns for eight years and is now the manager of the Blockchains office in Nevada. “That’s why I decided to move.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/nevada-bitcoin-blockchain-society.html