Much fanfare followed the announced in mid-January that Switch SUPERNAP would be building a Nevada data center that would eventually become the largest such facility in the world. Six months later, in early June, the company announced that the initial phase of construction has started on the Reno data center.
The three-million-square-foot, $1 billion facility will take close to a decade to complete, but a permit filed with the Storey County Building Department reveals that the initial grading to prepare the site is expected to be finished by late September. The Nevada data center is being built on 1,000 acres within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center and will eventually be neighbors with Tesla Motors' gigafactory.
Switch already operates a Las Vegas data center, and creating an additional facility in Reno allows the company to expand its Superloop coverage within Nevada and California. Once the new site is up and running, speeds between the two data centers will be reduced to only 7 milliseconds. Speeds to San Francisco and Los Angeles are both under 15 milliseconds. According to Adam Kramer, vice president of strategy for Switch, 50 million customers will be able to access connections within 14 milliseconds thanks to the more expansive fiber optic network.
While it will take between five and 10 years to fully complete the facility, the first phase of the Reno data center is expected to open in the second quarter of 2016. Close to 90 percent of the employees at the Las Vegas data center are Nevadans, and the company hopes to keep the same percentage or higher when they begin hiring for the Reno facility.
Brought to you by WiredRE, the nation's leading cloud, colocation, and data center advisory firm.
