Your Daily Guide

🎰 Rolling Out the Casino Carpet

The new Hard Rock Hotel and Casino is well on its way to opening on schedule in 2027. But we gotta know — what will the carpet look like?City Cast Las Vegas revisits the history of casino carpets in Las Vegas, including the psychology behind the designs. [City Cast Las Vegas 🎧]

🚨 Police Officer Dies Racing Between Baker and Vegas

A 30-year-old Los Angeles County deputy died while taking part in a relay race between Baker and Las Vegas. He suffered a “medical emergency” while competing and received care, but couldn’t be saved. The 120-mile Baker to Vegas Challenge Cup dates back to 1985 and regularly draws law enforcement teams from throughout California as participants. [CBS News]

🏒 Golden Knights Replace Coach

Bruce Cassidy led the Vegas Golden Knights to the Stanley Cup in 2023, but — what have you done for me lately? The coach was fired in the midst of a slump and replaced with John Tortorella for the final eight games of the season. [Associated Press]

• The Aces are having a better week. Season tickets for the reigning WNBA champs sold out for the third straight year. [Las Vegas Review-Journal]
• March Madness is winding down. (Can I start over with a bracket of four teams?) Some of the viewing parties are still going strong. [City Cast Las Vegas ✍️]
• And yes, the Super Bowl is official for Vegas in 2029 🏆 [NBC News]

🇰🇷 K-Pop Bubble Refuses to Burst

Blackpink is so popular, just one quarter of the group is enough to headline a Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. [Variety]

• Celine Dion is back with her first residency in seven years! But it’s not in Vegas. [KSNV]
• Las Vegas performer Maren Wade is suing Taylor Swift, claiming the singer’s “Life of a Showgirl” album title is too similar to her trademarked “Confessions of a Showgirl” brand 🤔 Sounds like a stretch for legal argument, but a home run for a publicity stunt. [USA Today]

💾 Is $457 Million in Data Center Tax Breaks Paying Off?

Turns out, it’s harder to answer than you might think! Despite approving more than $450 million in tax abatements for data centers — operated by Switch, Google, and Apple, to name a few — Nevada keeps few, if any, public records on whether these data centers are actually living up to their lofty economic promises. [The Nevada Independent]

• Abatements have been among Nevada’s favored tools for luring new businesses for more than a decade (think: Tesla Gigafactory). They work by eliminating some tax burdens on the promise of jobs and other guarantees, ideally boosting the economy enough to offset the lost taxes. [Las Vegas Review-Journal]
• Is that the case here? Impossible to tell, as it appears that as long as data center companies are complying with the tax abatement rules the company gets to determine what parts of the tax audits are actually public. Very cool. And potentially illegal?! 🙃 [Nevada Independent]
• It’s part of a complicated picture around data centers more broadly, especially as eye-watering loans and speculative, circular investments into new AI-based data centers have fueled widening concerns over a potential AI bubble. [Bloomberg]
• All the while, these data centers have raised fresh, unanswered questions over power and water use that — at least in the short term — will likely derail a (state) constitutionally-mandated clean energy target. [The Nevada Independent] 💸