Las Vegas’ data center giant bought another huge stretch of land in Southern Nevada for a mountain of money.

Switch purchased 176.5 acres in North Las Vegas’ Apex Industrial Park for $196 million, property records show. The sale, by two separate groups, closed Aug. 31 and marked a meteoric rise in land values.

Las Vegas-based Switch has gobbled up land in Southern Nevada and borrowed billions of dollars over the past few years, laying the foundation for new data centers amid a rapid industry increase that has rankled communities nationwide.

Data centers are basically warehouses filled with computer servers and other gear needed to store clients’ data. Locally, the industry is all but synonymous with Switch, a homegrown company founded by Rob Roy with a cluster of several big facilities in the southwest Las Vegas Valley area.

Switch has data centers in other parts of the country as well, and lately, it has been stockpiling land and funding amid a national data-center construction boom, fueled in no small part by the rapid expansion of, and heavy investments in, artificial-intelligence systems.

Since late last year, Switch purchased roughly 546 acres in Southern Nevada for about $463 million combined through several transactions, property records show.

Most of this was in Apex, a remote and mostly empty industrial park in the desert some 25 miles northeast of the Las Vegas Strip.

Overall, Switch has now snapped up nearly 493 acres in Apex for $376.5 million, property records show.

The company did not provide comments for this story.

Big expansion, and big backlash

Nationwide, an all-but insatiable demand for digital storage space has sparked a data-center building frenzy.

The American Edge Project, a tech advocacy group, and the Technology Councils of North America reported in December that the U.S. had more than 4,100 active data centers and nearly 2,800 others in the pipeline.

“AI infrastructure is revitalizing communities nationwide,” the report declared.

There has also been fierce and sweeping backlash to this expansion, fueled by anxieties over data centers’ water use, energy demands, noise pollution and other effects on surrounding communities. Moreover, there are widespread fears that employers will lay off masses of workers and replace them with AI-powered computer systems.

Amid the growing uproar over data centers, elected officials in Southern Nevada and beyond have taken aim at the industry. Last month, for instance, the Nye County Commission voted to ban data-center construction in the stressed water basin that serves Pahrump.

Also, the Nevada Legislature looks poised to take on data-center regulation in 2027, with one bill proposed by an interim committee to pause data-center construction statewide and stop giving tax breaks to such projects.

These energy-hungry facilities typically rely on water to help cool their servers, an issue that has drawn increased attention locally as Southern Nevada grapples with a decades-long drought and a deeply shrunken Lake Mead, the reservoir that supplies about 90 percent of the Las Vegas area’s water.

In Southern Nevada, a ban on evaporative cooling systems has effectively eliminated the possibility of building data centers that are more water-intensive.

Data centers also consume vast amounts of electric power.

NV Energy, Nevada’s primary electric utility, has reported that data centers accounted for 5 percent of its total sales last year — and that by 2046, it expects data centers to account for 64 percent of its total sales.

Switch says that all of its data centers are powered by 100 percent renewable energy, and that it identifies and leads water-improvement projects to allow the company to run its campuses on 100 percent recycled water.

‘It’s happening all over the country’

Las Vegas consultant John Restrepo, owner of RCG Economics, said that data-center operators have ventured into rural areas around the country because they need big tracts of land for their projects.

This has led to a backlash because the facilities would consume vast amounts of energy in sparsely populated communities, he added.

Apex is outside the Las Vegas Valley’s population base and spans 18,000 acres. Still, for a data center in Apex, its effect on regional energy supplies will depend on where it draws water and power from, Restrepo said.

But he said that Apex, along Interstate 15 at U.S. Highway 93, is as good a site as any to develop a data center and that Switch is building more facilities amid the massive demand.

“It’s happening all over the country,” he said.

In the latest transaction, Switch acquired most of its new spread in Apex from a group led by Las Vegas real estate investor Dan Tuntland.

And, property records show, the now-former owners sold the land for vastly higher sums than they paid.

Tuntland’s group acquired nearly 203 acres in Apex for $11.2 million in 2021 — and then sold 147 acres of that to Switch for around $163.5 million.

Plus, Switch acquired the balance of its new spread, 29 acres, for about $32.5 million from a group that purchased the same tract in 2023 for $5 million, property records show.

Tuntland, owner of DJT Real Estate, said he originally bought the roughly 200-acre site as a speculative investment amid the shrinking availability of land for new warehouse projects in Southern Nevada.

At the time, he never thought a data-center operator would come along to buy it from him, he recalled.

But he said that his group eventually put out a call for offers and that all of the interested buyers were data-center companies.

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Review-Journal staff writer Alan Halaly contributed to this report.