Nevada's utility is being asked for 5,900 megawatts, and its cities are starting to say no.

Why Nevada is a market at all

Nevada was built as a data center state on four arguments that all still hold. There is no corporate income tax and no personal income tax. The geology is quiet by western standards, which matters a great deal when the alternative is California. The climate is dry, so the cooling problem is heat rather than humidity. And Las Vegas sits four to seven milliseconds from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, close enough that a workload can serve California users from outside California's tax, seismic and regulatory exposure.

That last point is the whole commercial case, and it is why this market exists as a colocation market rather than only as a hyperscale one. Companies put production in Nevada to serve California. The fibre was built for exactly that, including a private route between the two Switch campuses and the Bay Area.

We cover both valleys on one page because they are one market in every way that decides a deal. They share a utility, a legislature, a tax regime and now a political argument, and neither carries enough interconnection to be read on its own. Las Vegas holds most of the networks. Reno holds most of the land.

Who is actually plugged in across Las Vegas and Reno

A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.

The most connected buildings here

From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.

What has been announced in Las Vegas and Reno

Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and every figure links to the report it came from and was read in that report before it was written down. It is never added to the interconnection count above: one is a plan a company published, the other is a building a network registered itself into. Neither is availability.

The politics turned, and it happened in about six months

Nevada spent twenty years courting this industry and then, over one stretch of 2026, several of its cities moved the other way. The Reno City Council voted 6 to 1 to extend a moratorium on new data center approvals through 31 August 2027, which is a long pause by any standard and covers the valley where most of the developable land is. The Henderson City Council took up an ordinance pausing new data center permits, introduced at its meeting of 16 June. More than fifty people attended or called into a Boulder City Planning Commission meeting on 20 May that ended in a 6 to 1 vote against recommending a project.

Clark County went the other way. On 17 June 2026 the commission unanimously approved a Switch expansion, a 56,800 square foot building on nine acres near Warm Springs Road, over public pushback. Switch already operates more than two million square feet near Decatur Boulevard and the 215 Beltway, so the county was extending an existing neighbour rather than admitting a new one, which is a distinction that has decided several of these votes.

For a buyer the practical reading is narrow and useful. Capacity that already exists and is already energised inside Clark County is worth more than it was a year ago, because the pipeline behind it has been slowed in three of the jurisdictions that would have supplied it. If a proposal you are shown depends on a building that has not been approved yet, ask which city, and then ask what that city did this year.

Power is the constraint, and the arithmetic is public

NV Energy estimates that the demand from twelve data center projects would be 5,900 megawatts. The comparison the utility itself reached for is Hoover Dam, and the answer is about 2.8 times its capacity. Almost a quarter of Nevada's electricity already goes to data centers.

That collides with the state's own clean energy target of 50 percent renewable power by 2030. Meeting the proposed load would take roughly three times the electricity Las Vegas uses, and the utility has been plain that it probably cannot do that without fossil generation. Whatever your view of the policy, the consequence for a tenant is straightforward: power in this state is going to get more contested and more expensive, and any quote built on today's rate should be stress tested against that.

Where the market actually is, submarket by submarket

When this market is right, and when it is the wrong choice

Nevada is the right answer when you want to serve California from outside California. Four to seven milliseconds to Los Angeles and the Bay Area is close enough for almost everything short of synchronous database replication, and you exchange California's tax, seismic and regulatory profile for a state with no corporate income tax. For disaster recovery paired with a California primary it is the standard answer for good reason.

It is also the right answer for anyone whose requirement is scale on cheap land and who can live in Storey County. The Tahoe Reno Industrial Center exists precisely for deployments that do not fit anywhere on the coast.

It is the wrong choice if your requirement depends on a building that has not been approved yet. Three jurisdictions moved against new approvals in 2026 and the utility is holding requests it has said it cannot fully serve. It is also the wrong choice if you need deep peering: this state's entire network fabric is smaller than a single building in Silicon Valley, and if you need to reach many networks in one place rather than reach California quickly, you are shopping the wrong market. Water belongs in the conversation too. This is the driest state in the country and cooling design is a live local political issue, so ask what the building actually consumes rather than accepting a regional sustainability claim.