Driving down the interstate through the dry Nevada desert, there are few signs that a vast expanse of new construction is hiding behind the sagebrush-covered hills. But just beyond a massive power plant and transmission towers that march up into the dusty brown mountains lies one of the world’s biggest buildouts of datacenters – miles of new concrete buildings that house millions of computer servers.
This business park, called the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, has a sprawling landmass greater than the city of Denver. It is home to the largest datacenter in the US, built by the company Switch, and tech giants like Google and Microsoft have also bought land here and are constructing enormous facilities. A separate Apple datacenter complex is just down the road. A Tesla “gigafactory”, which builds electric vehicle batteries, is a resident too.
