Tract purchases 2,200 acres at TRIC

Two gigawatts of power.

That’s roughly the average output of two nuclear power plants. It’s also how much power is slated to be delivered to two massive parcels of land in Tahoe Reno Industrial Center that ultimately will become ground zero in Northern Nevada’s burgeoning data center industry.

Tract, a Denver-based investor in master-planned data center parks, recently completed purchase of 2,200 acres at TRIC and is advancing plans to prepare pad-ready sites for data center users and developers, said Grant van Rooyen, chief executive officer of Tract.

Making the large land play was Tract’s game plan ever since executives first put boots on Northern Nevada soil in 2022.

“We came with the objective of comparing our market level assessment of Northern Nevada from afar with our on-the-ground assessment, and we very quickly came to the conclusion that this was a market in which we wanted to own positioned-powered land,” van Rooyen told NNBW in an exclusive interview. “We have been working since then to put a transaction of this magnitude together. The next phase is all of the horizontal development that goes into positioning this land for vertical development by end users.”

Tract purchased the land from Blockchains, which bought 67,000 acres at TRIC in January 2018. Donny Gilman, general manager of Lance Gilman Commercial Real Estate Services, represented Tract in the land purchase. The land at TRIC encompasses areas known as the Peru Shelf and South Valley.

Grant van Rooyen

 

Van Rooyen said that although Tract is working to make similar land investments in 13 other states, Northern Nevada quickly became a priority market. The company typically seeks a minimum of 1,000 contiguous acres that includes a pathway to at least a gigawatt of power, he added.

“We are working in a number of markets in the U.S. to find investments that can meet the building blocks of tomorrow for data centers with magnitudes of contiguous land and magnitudes of power that reflect the growth in the data center industry,” van Rooyen said. “In this area, that means TRI, and that means Blockchains for land of that magnitude.”

Tract’s next step is to position the land for vertical construction by end users by installing all horizontal development, including:

• Pre-positioning all the power

• Water

• Sewer

• Fiber optic cabling

• Master grading and road development

Van Rooyen said all land will be held as an investment until it’s ready for vertical development.

“Right now, this land is not for sale,” he said. “Ultimately, the end customers will be the broader cloud and AI industries that require these buildings for their computing resources, and potentially the wholesale developers who build vertical facilities and lease them to end-users.

“We master plan all our developments into developable pads. We will have the ability for these campuses to have a single user or multiple users, each with their own data center facility within the campus, but those decisions will emerge once we have advanced all the horizontal development.”

Meeting Tract’s two-gigawatt power capacity needs will be a tremendous undertaking. To give you an idea of scale, van Rooyen said that much power is roughly 10 times that of the next individual power user at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. It’s also more than double the total capacity of NV Energy’s Tracy Generating Station east of town, which has powered homes throughout the Truckee Meadows since the early 1960s.

The Peru Shelf and South Valley land parcels each will have two or more dedicated power substations, van Rooyen said. A primary substation from NV Energy will feed ancillary substations that will distribute power throughout each land package.

“Two gigawatts of power requires an enormous investment in high-voltage energy infrastructure and transmission to deliver that capacity, but the demand is predictable, and when it arrives it is efficient for the grid,” van Rooyen said.

With data center industry growth north of 25 percent each year, though, that type of power capacity is what’s required to meet industry demand, he added.

“If you consider the total deployed and consumed gigawatts in the United States today for broad data center usage, it’s somewhere around 10 to 12 gigawatts,” van Rooyen said. “Put a 25-percent growth rate on that, and those numbers get very large very quickly.”

Van Rooyen said that when the Peru Shelf and South Valley parcels are fully built out by end users over the next 15 or so years, total capital investment in vertical construction could exceed $20 billion. End-user investment in servers, data storage drives, networking and related computing infrastructure equipment for the data centers, meanwhile, could be in the range of $50 to $75 billion.

Van Rooyen told NNBW that Storey County’s business-friendly environment allowed the company to move quickly on the land purchase, and Tract’s strong relationship with NV Energy helped facilitate its massive power delivery plans.

“We continue to be bullish in this market beyond this current purchase,” van Rooyen said. “You can expect to see more announcements through the rest of this year in other locations.

“The data center industry has become critical to how everyone lives and works everyday,” he added. “This is the same critical infrastructure as the utilities you enjoy at home, such as water and electricity. The access to communications resources, and the services that are provided by the public cloud infrastructure, whether it's from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others, is critical to how business works today and to how we choose to live. Developing and delivering this infrastructure benefits all the citizenry of this country.”