Editor's Essay
Who is the local optimist in your town? Not the one posting hot takes about the latest national story, but the person who is genuinely fired up about what is happening right here.
Read the essayMany buildings, one block, a shared green courtyard. The old pattern behind the world's best neighborhoods is illegal in most of Reno. Here is how to change that.
A 60-year-old Reno company is one of the world's geothermal leaders. Now its 24/7 clean power is being signed up to run Google's and Switch's Nevada data centers.
Tesla's co-founder left to build a closed-loop battery supply chain in Carson City. Now it's worth $6 billion and runs an AI data center on used EV batteries in Sparks.
Two immigrants bought a small Sparks electronics shop in 1994. Today it builds the Air Force's next doomsday plane and spun off a company racing to orbit.
Technology
An AI chip company headquartered in Reno raised $230M at a billion-dollar valuation and put its hardware in Oracle's cloud. The bet it is making.
It started in the back of a Reno warehouse with one plasma table bought on credit. In 2026 it raised $110M at a billion-dollar valuation. A deeply reported profile.
2027 Session
Two building-code fixes, right-sized elevators and single-stair mid-rise, that make attainable housing cheaper to build in Nevada with no loss of safety. The same elevator costs about 3x more here than in Europe, and the second staircase we require is mostly dead weight. Both are fixable. Both have been fixed elsewhere.
See the case"The things that actually shape your daily life are almost always closer than you think. They are happening in your neighborhood, your city, your state."
The Silver Lining is a home for optimistic writing about Nevada's technology, infrastructure, economic development, and policy landscape. Personal, biased toward possibility, and rooted in substance. Not the news of the day -- the story behind it.
Write For UsThe companies, founders, and infrastructure building Nevada's digital future.
Water, energy, transit, and the systems that make communities work for the long run.
Jobs, industries, and the economic development decisions shaping Nevada's next chapter.
Nevada Stories is now its own independent publication — 130 stories, 158 years of downtown Reno history, published every weekday.
Read Nevada Stories →The Silver Lining is built on local voices. If you know something happening in Nevada that deserves more optimism and more oxygen, we want to hear from you. No journalism degree required -- just something real to say.
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