After several companies followed Tesla’s lead in its initiative to establish a presence at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, the massive 105,000-acre industrial park in Nevada is nearly sold out on its land. Lance Gilman, Principal and Director of TRI, who’s company owns the land at the commercial center noted that almost all of the 165-square-mile area has been sold out, thanks in no small part to progressive firms like California-based Tesla.
Only 250 acres of land from the TRI remain undeveloped, according to Gilman. The pace of the area’s development has been unprecedented, as initial expectations for the site predicted that the 105,000-acre land would be fully sold and developed within three generations. As it turned out, however, it will take less than 20 years before almost the entirety of the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center was purchased.
“We thought this would take three generations to accomplish. That was my vision at the time. I thought for sure, based on the rate of absorption in Northern Nevada, that we would, certainly, be looking at three generations. But it has been done in less than 20 years,” Gilman said, according to a Las Vegas Sun report.
Gilman admitted that the pace of development in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center had experienced a significant boost since 2014 — the year when Tesla selected the TRI as the site for its first Gigafactory. The massive battery production facility is tasked with manufacturing the battery and drivetrain for the Model 3, as well as the Elon Musk-led firm’s Powerwall and Powerpack energy solutions.
While the site had already been developing at an admirable rate prior to the arrival of the California-based electric car and energy company, the TRI partner-broker credits Tesla as the spark that ultimately encouraged several other firms to invest in the industrial park. In a statement to the Las Vegas Sun, Gilman described how Tesla became the catalyst for the boost in interest and development at the TRI.
“I always smile when I go back and think about four years ago when Tesla arrived. We already had about 115 companies in there… But when we met Tesla, that put us on an entirely different international platform. And when that platform started to grow, all of a sudden, here came Switch and others, and we just had these corporate groups come in here, following Tesla all of a sudden. And so we’ve entered the tech world.”
The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center partner-broker further noted that just recently, 15 other companies have purchased plots of land in the area. Most of these new transactions involved companies that are, just like Tesla, trailblazing new technologies in the business and consumer landscape. Google purchased 1,210 acres of land at the industrial center for $29.1 million last year and will reportedly build a data center on the premise. Another notable company taking residence is Blockchains LLC, a company focused on the development of blockchain distributed ledger technology.
As we noted in a recent report, Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 seems to be exhibiting growth from within, with the company ramping up its efforts to hire more workers for the site despite the main structure remaining relatively unchanged for the past six months. Once the Nevada Gigafactory is fully completed, the structure would be the largest building in the world by footprint. True to Tesla’s goal of ushering in an era of emissions-free manufacturing, the Nevada Gigafactory is also designed to be powered by sustainable energy.
