October 21， 2025
Las Vegas-based data center owner Switch has borrowed nearly $659 million through a bond sale this week, a move designed to fuel its expansion amid an all-but insatiable need for digital storage and advanced computing power. The company announced it will use the proceeds to fund its growth strategy, including ongoing development at its data-center campuses in Las Vegas and other locations across the country. This latest capital raise was executed through so-called asset-backed securities, bringing the total Switch has borrowed through this type of financing to around $3.5 billion since last year.
This new funding initiative follows a major financial expansion this past summer, when Switch announced an increase of its borrowing base and revolving credit lines to $10 billion. The company stated it has now raised $20 billion since 2024 through “sustainable financing structures,” which include green loans and green bonds. In general, sustainable finance refers to debt funding for investments tied to environmental, social or governance initiatives, according to law firm DLA Piper. Switch said it would use these proceeds to support campus growth nationwide, reduce its cost of capital, and fully retire the bank debt from the 2022 buyout that took the company private.
A significant portion of the funding is also earmarked for the expansion of its latest type of computing power-packed warehouse: founder Rob Roy’s AI factories. While a typical data center is filled with servers to store clients’ data, an AI factory is specifically engineered to power artificial-intelligence systems. These facilities feature an air-and-liquid-cooled design that supports “extreme densities” of computing power, and the company reported that construction is currently underway across all five of its Switch campuses. Locally, this translates to new AI factories being built in the southwest Las Vegas Valley, adjacent to its existing cluster of data centers.
This industry-wide push for advanced computing capacity was further highlighted on Tuesday when Facebook parent Meta Platforms announced a funding deal for a $27 billion data-center campus in Louisiana, explicitly linking the project to its “long-term AI ambitions.” The rapid expansion of data centers, however, brings increased scrutiny to their environmental footprint, particularly water usage for cooling. This is a critical issue in Southern Nevada, which is grappling with a decades-long drought and a significantly depleted Lake Mead, the source of 90 percent of the region’s water supply. In response to these concerns, a ban on evaporative cooling systems was finalized in Southern Nevada since last year, effectively eliminating the possibility of constructing more water-intensive data centers.
SOURCE Reviewjournal.com
