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 data centers – 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 data center 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 data center complex is just down the road. Tesla’s gigafactory, which builds electric vehicle batteries, is a resident too.
In the mid-1800s, this area was an Old West boomtown. It’s situated in Storey county where one of the largest deposits of gold and silver in the American west was discovered, lending it the name: “The Richest Place on Earth”. It’s where Mark Twain came to be a miner, then got his start as a writer for the local newspaper. He later wrote about it in his book Roughing It, saying: “The ‘flush times’ were in magnificent flower … money was as plenty as dust.”
The gold rush is long history, but Storey county is once again one of the fastest growing economies in Nevada. A new boom is happening here in the high desert – fueled by artificial intelligence.
The burgeoning tech, which Silicon Valley vows will be the next frontier for humanity, is minting unfathomable trillion-dollar valuations. It’s a product that’s still being tested, and there’s uncertainty as to how exactly it will transform the economy. But that hasn’t stopped its real-world infrastructure from being built at mass capacity and record speed – a frenzy buoyed by hundreds of billions in venture capital funding.
Microsoft, working with OpenAI, announced last month that it plans to double its data-center footprint over the next two years. Amazon, partnering with Anthropic, just opened a major cluster with plans for more. Google, Meta and Oracle are preparing vast buildouts, as is a consortium of companies working with the Trump administration on a $500bn project called Stargate. In all, estimates by consulting firm McKinsey and Company peg global spending on AI data centers to total nearly $7tn by 2030 – nearly twice as much as the GDP of the UK.
The buildup comes at a cost. As the planet’s most powerful companies race to fulfill their dreams of artificial general intelligence – a futuristic version of AI that can perform tasks as well as humans – it means an ever-increasing need for…
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