EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure building 1.5 million square-foot data center at TRIC

Reno-Sparks may be a few hundred miles from the tech epicenter of the San Francisco Bay Area, but as far as data transmission goes, it might as well be situated in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Low latency of 3 milliseconds – 6 milliseconds round trip – is one of the main reasons why EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure is building a massive 1.5 million square-foot data center at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, said Wylie Nelson, vice president of network and land acquisitions for EdgeCore.

Combine those low data transmission speeds with Northern Nevada’s proximity to large West Coast population centers, a business-friendly climate and attractive power rates, and the Silver State made an excellent location for the company’s latest project.

Wylie Nelson

 

“Northern Nevada is a really good fit,” Nelson said. “We aren’t alone — other companies have announced or have already built data centers there.

“What we are doing that may be a little different, though, is that we are really thinking about capacity and scale for our target customers — businesses that want to apply AI and cloud and need concentrated capacity on a single campus.”

Broomfield, Colo.-based EdgeCore plans to construct two 750,000 square-foot two-story buildings at 3000 USA Parkway that will support 216 megawatts of critical IT load. The Northern Nevada data center is the largest in EdgeCore’s growing data center portfolio. Work is underway on a data center campus in Santa Clara, Calif. that will support 72 MW of critical IT load, and in March EdgeCore announced plans to build two data centers in Northern Virginia capable of supporting a combined 90 MW. Its 40-acre data center campus at the Mesa, Ariz., Elliot Road Technology Corridor, meanwhile, can support 200 MW once it’s fully built out.

Other companies operating data centers at or near TRIC include Google, Apple and Switch. Novva Data Centers, meanwhile, is in the process of building a data center at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. The West Jordan, Utah-based company is building six data center halls totaling 300,000 square-feet on 20 acres at Astro Way. Each data hall is capable of supporting 10 megawatts.

The EdgeCore facility, however, ranks among the largest data centers in Northern Nevada and is designed for large tech companies — the names that everybody knows, Nelson said.

“Those are the customers EdgeCore is working with,” he said. “We target the largest technology clients, and what they are telling us is that they need density. We define density as capacity concentrated on a single campus, with all the infrastructure to support it. That’s exactly what we are delivering here.”

Although the Northern Nevada data center could accommodate several tenants, the facility ultimately may serve just a single client that requires the whole campus, Nelson said. Staffing at the facility would be determined by the end tenant and its needs, he added.

EdgeCore has partnered with a leading data center builder to construct its facility, but Nelson declined to name the contractor as contract terms had not yet been finalized. Work crews have already started grading at the site, but vertical construction has not yet commenced.

Creating a level site at TRIC required a great deal of blasting — some have said that part of Northern Nevada is the birthplace of rocks — but overall, the site posed no serious grading issues, Nelson said.

“We were fortunate that we selected a site that for Tahoe Reno Industrial Center was very level and flat. It had its topo challenges, but compared to what others are building on we count ourselves fortunate,” he said.

EdgeCore also built its own fiber optic cable route starting 26 miles north of Interstate 80 that links up with a main interconnection point in Reno to provide increased capacity and diversity, Nelson added.

“It connects our campus back to a main point of interconnection in the Reno market in a way that no other center has,” Nelson said. “It provides extra scale and diversity, which is always good from a network standpoint.”

The EdgeCore facility also will have an onsite dedicated power substation that’s fed from NV Energy. The substation allows EdgeCore to lower its power costs for the data center.

Most of our developments across the U.S. will be supported by a dedicated, on-site substation,” Nelson said. “Ultimately, you have enough scale that it warrants having its own dedicated transmission line and substation, which allows us to procure power on NV Energy’s transmission rate schedule rather than on a retail rate tariff.

“It’s typical for larger, cloud or AI-scale density campuses,” he added.

The substation will be built concurrently with the data center since it’s needed to power the facility, Nelson noted.

EdgeCore’s Northern Nevada data center is expected to come online near the end of 2025, though some phases of the project will be completed sooner, Nelson noted.

“It’s an excellent location, and we like the community. Nevada is business friendly, and NV Energy is a fantastic partner. This is a very good place to develop a data center, and this is a project we are very excited about.”