$3 billion data center project at TRIC pushing forward
A rendering of the Vantage Data Centers near the southeast corner of Electric Avenue and USA Parkway at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center.
Courtesy Vantage Data Centers
By Rob Sabo,, Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Vantage Data Centers likened the building of its Northern Nevada data center campus to moving a mountain.
Vantage in 2023 purchased 137 acres near the southeast corner of Electric Avenue and USA Parkway at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. Like much of the remaining land at TRIC, the site posed serious topographical challenges in creating a level pad to construct Vantage Data Center’s planned 1.1 million square-foot Northern Nevada campus.
Seth Pederson, senior vice president of sales for Vantage Data Centers, told NNBW the complex excavation work required removal and leveling a tremendous amount of dirt and rocks on the hilltop site.
“It was an incredible feat of construction and ingenuity to develop the parcel so we could build a data center,” Pederson said.
Vantage Data Centers operates 36 data center campuses on five continents. Its Northern Nevada campus will have 224 megawatts of power when fully built out. The first of four planned four-story buildings is already constructed and is expected to open in the second quarter of 2026. Vantage has already leased two buildings, or 128 megawatts, to an undisclosed tenant, Pederson said.
McCarthy Building Cos., is the general contractor on Vantage’s Northern Nevada data center campus, which is estimated to cost approximately $3 billion. More than 1,200 people are expected to be employed during construction and ongoing data center operations, Vantage said in a statement.
Northern Nevada offered many compelling reasons to locate a data center, Pederson noted. Vantage Data Centers operates three data center campuses in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley totaling 216 megawatts of critical IT load, but Nevada’s growing presence as a data center hub presented excellent opportunities for additional scalability for tenants, Pederson said.
“We are the largest data center operator today in (Silicon Valley), and the proximity to Northern California is fantastic,” Pederson said. “Reno and the state of Nevada present an opportunity for our tenants to access low-latency routes, and it’s just a natural evolution from a western U.S. perspective to meet the demands of AI and give our tenants the ability to scale and grow.”
Dana Adams, Vantage’s North America region president, said Vantage’s accelerated development schedule in Storey County was a primary factor in choosing the Silver State for data center development.
“Nevada provided us a strategic opportunity to accelerate time-to-market for our customers while supporting the local economy through the creation of long-term jobs and tax revenue,” Adams said in a statement.
The ongoing shift in the data center industry due to the growth of artificial intelligence continues to push new development, Pederson said, with hyperscalers leasing entire buildings and full data center campuses when possible.
“The race to super intelligence has changed the game – it’s all about scale and power,” he said. “The stakes just continue to grow.
“It’s a race to ‘Ready For Service’ in Reno, at our new campus, we are able to turn up capacity in April of 2026, which was a compelling event for our tenant. They needed to have the first tranche of capacity delivered in the first half of 2026.”
Development of the other two buildings at Vantage Data Centers’ Northern Nevada campus could potentially be leased to the same tenant and is based on Vantage’s ability to deliver power. Pederson said the company would develop the entire facility all at once if it were able to secure power from NV Energy, but its power ramp, or the schedule at which power will be delivered to Vantage’s data center campus, runs through 2029, Pederson noted.
“Power is the obstacle in our business right now,” he said. “If we could get power from NV Energy now, we would lease all 224 megawatts. Our tenants want power and space sooner rather than later, and if we had the power we would lease more buildings.”
Although the rapid development of data center campuses at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center makes it difficult for Vantage and other developers to secure the power needed for their facilities, it’s a common problem across the U.S. and the world, Pederson noted.
“It’s not just Nevada, it’s every state,” he said. “It started with Dominion Energy in Virginia (Data Center Alley is located in Ashburn), and that parlayed to PG&E and Silicon Valley Power in Northern California, where we also have large campuses. The energy grids were not built to enable terawatts of capacity.”
Mark Freeman, vice president of global marketing for Vantage Data Centers, told NNBW that its Northern Nevada campus will use a closed-loop chiller system that minimizes the need to consume a lot of water for cooling purposes.
“There’s a lot of conversation around water usage for data center cooling in Nevada, but we have a closed-loop system so we are not constantly feeding additional water into the system,” Freeman said.
source: https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2025/aug/05/3-billion-data-center-project-at-tahoe-reno-industrial-center-pushing-forward/
