ARMON: “Directions to 255 USA Parkway ….” (Siri response)
Brian Armon -a commercial real estate broker - is driving to the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center … which rises from the sagebrush like a pop-up book.
ARMON: “So, the building you see up on the hill there, that’s Vantage Data Centers … EdgeCore, that’s a data center that’s under construction …
Flat-roof buildings stretch against brown hills. Cranes and excavators stand still like toys.
ARMON: “This is Google’s data center over here, kind of the nondescript concrete building …”
Here, global tech giants are racing to turn desert land into the backbone of the internet.
ARMON: “So this piece right here was recently acquired by Microsoft, it’s about 226 acres.”
It checks all the boxes for data centers – plenty of land and few natural disasters.
ARMON: “We’ve had a massive amount of data centers that have shown up … and more that are looking.”
Not just in northern Nevada – but across the Mountain West.
Data centers are starting to spark public outrage at meetings – from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Tucson, Arizona. The Sierra Club has challenged the first approved project within Reno city limits.
The concern: water. Data centers’ servers generate a lot of heat and many use huge amounts of water for cooling.
Stanford hydrologist Newsha Ajami says they’re like thirsty crops – but permanent.
AJAMI: “You have to continuously water them, right? So it doesn't provide that flexibility that's needed, especially during dry or drought periods.”
A 2024 federal report found that U.S. data centers used 17 billion gallons of water. That’s enough to supply 150,000 homes for a year.
That’s still only a fraction of what American farmers use - but data centers' water demand is projected to double or even quadruple within the next few years.
This comes as climate change threatens water supplies with rising temperatures and deeper droughts, says Sean McKenna, a scientist at the Desert Research Institute.
MCKENNA: “And that's not good, because snow is like our water tower, right? That's how we store that moisture for later in the year.”
Today, about 75% of the Mountain West is in drought.
In Nevada, over half its groundwater basins are also over-allocated – more water on paper than exists underground.
The Tahoe Reno Industrial Center’s water district holds rights to more than 4 billion gallons a year – mostly groundwater and treated wastewater, says general manager Shari Whalen.
WHALEN: “This is one of our most productive groundwater wells.”
And she says all new projects built here have to consider water use.
WHALEN: “Our plan is not to bring water in from anywhere else. Our plan is to fully and responsibly utilize the resources we have.”
The district says it doesn’t use city drinking water.
But, when needed, it can draw up to 325 million gallons a year from the Truckee River.
It’s the region’s main water source — spilling from Lake Tahoe, through Reno, across the desert, and into Pyramid Lake, home of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe – which has about 1,300 members living on the reservation.
WADSWORTH: “Every drop that's pulled out of the river is exactly that – that's a drop that doesn't make it to Pyramid Lake.”
Tribal Chairman Steven Wadsworth says this lake is far more than water.
WADSWORTH: “This is why we get up every morning – Pyramid Lake. Our traditional name, Cui-ui Tucutta, which means fish eater. That's who we are as a people.”
That’s why they fought the business park’s plans to pump more groundwater. In 2019, Nevada regulators sided with the tribe, another chapter in their fight to protect their lake.
WADSWORTH: “Everybody's only focused on what's going to happen this year, and the next two, three years, and that's just not far enough to think.”
Nevada already has about 60 data centers … with a dozen more planned over the next decade. And some of those could tap into the river that feeds Pyramid Lake.
For the Mountain West News Bureau, I’m Kaleb Roedel.