After buying hundreds of acres in Apex Industrial Park, Switch is looking to build new data centers on a swath of its holdings.

Switch has filed plans with the city of North Las Vegas to develop a 486,250-square-foot complex on roughly 176 acres in the remote industrial park, according to city records that the Las Vegas Review-Journal obtained through a public-records request.

The project consists of two data-center buildings, a substation, a logistics office building and other components, according to a letter of intent that Switch sent to city officials last month.

As seen in the letter, the company is calling its project the Switch Core 2.0 Phase 1 Campus.

North Las Vegas spokeswoman Kathleen Richards said last week that the proposal had not yet been scheduled for a Planning Commission or City Council meeting.

Las Vegas-based Switch did not provide a comment for this story.

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.

Switch also goes to great lengths to protect its facilities, including through “mantraps” and non-disclosure agreements, saying it’s a “prime target” for terrorism, espionage and sabotage, as outlined in a letter obtained by the Review-Journal through its public-records request to the city of North Las Vegas.

Ryan Fleming, vice president of data center engineering at Switch, told city officials in the letter that government agencies and other customers choose Switch because of the measures it takes to protect their equipment.

The company has a “large security force, incorporates extensive security measures, including biometric scanners and mantraps, and executes extensive non-disclosure agreements with its customers, vendors, and contractors, in furtherance of that security,” Fleming wrote.

“Switch is a prime target for terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and other security related attacks,” he wrote, adding that the “likelihood of such a security assault increases if information about Switch’s engineering plans, processes, materials, technologies, locations, and services are made publicly available.”

With its project plans in Apex, Fleming asked the city for “confidential treatment to the fullest extent” allowed under the law.

He added: “If any request is received seeking disclosure of these materials, Switch requests prompt written notice before any release to permit assertion of legal remedies, including Attorney General review, court action, injunctive relief, protective orders, or sealing where applicable.”

Overall, Switch has gobbled up land 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.

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 mostly empty industrial park in the desert along Interstate 15 at U.S. Highway 93, some 25 miles northeast of the Las Vegas Strip.

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

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.

Switch, whose facilities include so-called AI factories that are smaller than its typical data centers but more densely packed with computing power, says that all of its centers run on 100 percent renewable energy.

It also says that it identifies and leads water-improvement projects to allow the company to run its campuses on 100 percent recycled water.

Amid the growing uproar over data centers in general, 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.

Nevada lawmakers also recently pushed ahead with plans to consider a bill next year that would pause data-center construction statewide and stop state-issued tax breaks for such projects.

Last week, Gov. Joe Lombardo signed an executive order that requires data-center developers to pay taxes toward schools and sign a commitment of community support before state officials consider any tax breaks for their projects.

Lombardo said in a news release that data centers should be built responsibly, adding that the developers “must pay their share, protect our water resources, keep costs from being passed on to ratepayers, and protect the communities that host them.”

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.