Switch says the $350 million facility will be the most advanced data center yet, using air cooling to support power loads of over 1,500 watts per square foot.

News of the SuperNAP was first mentioned earlier this month on the blog for Silverback Migration Solutions, a Switch customer. This past weekend, The Register posted a profile on Switch co-founder Rob Roy, which included a tour of one of Switch Communications' five existing Las Vegas data centers.

Now, after eight years of remaining relatively low-key, serving a customer base of military government and military and government customers and large Internet companies, Roy says SuperNAP will demonstrate to the greater public Switch's capabilities and the data center technologies it has developed.

The company also launched a company website, which offers information about the company's operations and a video preview of the SuperNAP.

Although Switch currently operates a room in one of its data centers with cabinets for an undisclosed name-brand customer running at 1,462 watts per square foot, Roy anticipates that the SuperNAP facility will be able to support customer power loads of 1,500 watts per square foot.

This figure is triple the 450 to 500 watts a square foot that many industry insiders claim is the upper limit for air cooling, as well as exceeds the power loads that Microsoft says its CBlox high-density data center containers for cloud computing is able to handle.

Last week there were a handful of other data center announcements. Software developer Oracle announced it is building a new data center in West Jordan, Utah, Google is opening a new $600 million data center in Lenoir, North Carolina and Salesforce is building its first international data center in Singapore.

Founded in 2000, Switch got its first big break in December 2002 when it purchased a 12,000 square foot facility from a former Enron broadband services company out of bankruptcy. Enron had been looking to build a commodity bandwidth exchange, and had established exceptional connectivity for its Las Vegas center.

Today, Switch says it has more than 20 backbones running through its bandwidth hub. This connectivity will greatly benefit the 1,100 foot long SuperNAP, which will also be supported by a 250 MVA power substation, and will have 146 MVA of generator capacity, meaning that the building may eventually have as many as 70 two-megawatt generators.

Once fully built out, Roy says the SuperNAP will hold 7,000 cabinets. The facility will be developed in phases, and Roy says Switch already has received orders of up to 2,000 cabinets from existing customers.

Switch's SuperNap has set its grand opening for November.