Billion-Dollar Data Centers And The Growing Opposition

Across almost all 50 states, there’s a move toward moratoriums on building data centers as concerns about their potential impact grow...and they remain a political liability as the midterms approach.

Janet Levy | July 22, 2026

Nestled between the sere hills east of Sparks, Nevada, and a little off the U.S. Parkway (SR-439), Switch’s Citadel Campus is a Las Vegas company specializing in data centers. One building is already operational: Tahoe Reno 1, a high-security, futuristic industrial shed standing on endless rows of girders, with a roof designed to withstand 200-mile-per-hour winds.

Inside, thousands of servers process data for businesses that pay for space, bandwidth, and security. To dissipate the enormous heat from the servers and the generators powering the unit, several million gallons of water are circulated through hundreds of miles of tubing—this in the driest state in the U.S., where groundwater is declining at an alarming rate. The low-frequency hum and noise from the center can be heard nearly a mile away.

Switch describes it as “the single largest colocation data center facility on the planet.” It has a footprint of 1.3 million square feet, roughly equivalent to 23 American football fields. Its power capacity—a metric of processing ability and the equivalent backup supply and cooling required—is 130 MW. For perspective, one megawatt can power 75 racks, each holding 21–42 servers, and power 500–1,000 homes.

When the eight planned buildings are ready, the 2,000-acre Citadel Campus, bounded by concrete walls, will offer a whopping 7 million square feet of server space and 650 MW of power capacity, making it the world’s most powerful data complex. Switch plans to develop it into an exascale ecosystem—with computers capable of quintillions of calculations per second, needed for AI and high-speed work, and power capacity running into several gigawatts.

As AI, cloud computing, and digital services touch all lives and demand for processing power grows exponentially, data centers are proliferating across the U.S. Over 3,000 centers are now operational, with 1,500 slated for........

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