Clark County NV / Switch LAS 19 / unanimous approval / dry-cooled / first counter-signal in 9 days

Counter-signal context. Every other data center vote tracked in the past nine days has been a pause or a ban. Clark County is the first 'go' vote inside the streak, and the unanimous margin on the Commission matches the broad-margin pattern the streak has shown — just inverted. The project itself. LAS 19 is a 56,000-square-foot building on a nine-acre site along Warm Springs Road and Edmond Street in southwest Las Vegas, less than half the square footage the parcel was previously entitled for under earlier industrial zoning. Switch (Nevada-headquartered colocation operator, sold to DigitalBridge / IFM Investors in 2022) is the developer. The design choice is the relevant variable. LAS 19 is dry-cooled — closed-loop air cooling rather than evaporative water cooling — which means near-zero water consumption for building operations. That eliminates the single most-cited concern in the moratorium hearings of the past nine days. Of the five recurring opposition issues (water, electrical demand, noise, heat, air quality), the project removed the largest one before it was put to a vote. Public commenters still opposed the project — Sierra Club and environmental justice advocates focused on AI-driven cumulative load growth and Nevada grid affordability — but the Commission approved unanimously and explicitly acknowledged that broader regulatory oversight may be needed in the future. The approval and the acknowledgment together are coherent: 'this specific project clears the bar we have today, but the bar may move up tomorrow.'

Primary source · Fox 5 Vegas ↗