Fendelander: Geek farming is Northern Nevada's new agriculture

This column originally ran in the RGJ’s “Reno Rebirth” blog.

The Biggest Little City’s economic future looks bright, but this time, it’s not the neon. We’re geek farming.

Bright minds, smart people, geeks — Reno is working on becoming packed with them. Big-name companies have liked it here for years; just look at Amazon, Microsoft, et al. We have low taxes and great air, road and rail connections right here in town. That makes us friendly for big business. We also have a few cards up our sleeve: power, bandwidth and plenty of room to grow.

It’s these three aces that are bringing data and fulfillment centers here. First, we landed Apple’s data center. Next came NJVC’s. Early this year, Rubicon Data Centers announced its intent to build a 300,000-square-foot data center as part of a master-planned campus about eight miles east of Reno. Online furniture retailer BizChair is slated to open a new distribution center in Stead.

With power to spare (much of it green), a great location with great access, plenty of bandwidth and Northern Nevada’s wide open spaces, data centers and distribution warehouses are a great fit for our burgeoning area. Booming as these two new sectors of our economy are, though, they’re just the beginning.

A new kind of manufacturing is hitting the scene around the globe: lights-out automation. It’s not too hard to imagine factory floors “manned” entirely by robots; we’ve all seen the inside of an automobile manufacturing plant on the news at some point. Until recently, though, the technology that would allow high-tech devices to be built by robots simply wasn’t available, which is why even the iPhone is still being made by hand. Lights-out automation saves on the intense (and currently off-shored, for the most part) labor of assembling small, high-tech devices. Better yet, it creates high-paying jobs for engineers and techs who design and keep the factories running.

We’re sitting right over the hill from the Bay Area, with loads of something they don’t have: inexpensive room to grow right next to air, rail and road.

The data and distribution centers coming to town are just the first step, and the proposed Knowledge Fund and recent TEDx event are big parts of step two — and proof that Reno’s begun growing geeks. With more big-name tech companies moving to town, it’s only logical that high-paying niche markets, high-tech jobs and startups will start cropping up.

Reno and Northern Nevada generally are poised to become the execution and implementation companion to Silicon Valley’s research and development empire.


Karl Fendelander lives in Reno and writes for the Marmot Companies, a Reno real estate firm with a focus on residential rehabilitation.

Original Articla Here