Concert History | U2 at Sam Boyd Stadium — The Million-LED Screen Entered Stadium Touring

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On April 25, 1997, U2 opened the PopMart Tour at Sam Boyd Stadium in Whitney, Nevada, the Las Vegas venue named in the band's [official tour archive](https://www.u2.com/blogs/popmart-leg-1-1997-north-america). This exact session matters because it placed an experimental display system in front of a stadium audience before that system began moving from city to city.

The screen's manufacturer, [SACO Technologies](https://saco.com/u2-pop-mart-tour/), says it had never worked in entertainment when U2, show designer Willie Williams and stage architect Mark Fisher commissioned the project. SACO describes 150,000 pixels containing eight LEDs apiece and summarizes the screen as using about one million separate LED fittings. It identifies the result as the world's first LED touring screen.

A contemporaneous [Wired report](https://www.wired.com/1997/05/in-the-name-of-led/) independently tied the screen to the April 25 Las Vegas opening. It reported that the blue LED had arrived just before the design work, allowing red, green and blue elements to make full-color pixels; the display required 22 miles of cable and 21,000 circuit boards. The place-based change was therefore not simply a larger backdrop. Sam Boyd Stadium became the first public stop for a full-color screen engineered as touring stage architecture rather than as a fixed venue board.

**Coordinate method.** The pin, 36.086269, -115.016737, is the center of the [OpenStreetMap stadium footprint](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/133899849). [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3470457) places Sam Boyd Stadium at 36.086389, -115.016667, about 15 metres away. The precision radius is 180 metres: it covers the bowl and field, while the exact 1997 stage position is not documented.

**Cover image.** Craig Butz's visually inspected [July 2014 aerial of Sam Boyd Stadium](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sam_Boyd_Stadium_from_the_air_July_2014.jpg) is the photographer's own work under CC BY-SA 4.0. It shows the empty stadium and its footprint; it does not depict U2, the 1997 concert or the PopMart stage configuration.