Las Vegas gains momentum as budding tech infrastructure hub

Dale Laizure, who has worked in information technology for more than 20 years, relocated last year to Las Vegas from Southern California to be part of the area’s emerging tech industry. He’s not alone. National commercial real estate services firm CBRE Group ranked Las Vegas as one of its top 10 “up and coming” tech talent markets in the U.S. and Canada. Laizure saw an opportunity to go into business for himself in Southern Nevada and will open his own CMIT franchise. Based in Austin, Texas, CMIT offers outsourced IT services for small and mid-sized companies. “You have technology companies like Google and Amazon, a technology-related company, which are big players in the game, moving to town,” Laizure said. “Clearly, there’s something there. You don’t see companies like Google and Amazon throw money behind an area unless they see the kind of momentum that I see and that everyone else sees.” Amazon recently opened its third fulfillment center in North Las Vegas, an 850,000-square-foot facility, while ground was broken in July for a $600 million Google data center in Henderson.