Switch
The Re-IPO Deep Dive — taken private at $11B in 2022, reportedly filed confidentially for a November 2026 listing at somewhere between $50B and $80B, with $24B of financing raised since 2024 and not one consolidated number disclosed since.
Switch is the first large AI-era data-center re-listing: a founder-run, Tier-5-designed, 100% renewably powered campus operator that DigitalBridge and IFM bought for $11B in December 2022 — months before the GPU build-out repriced every megawatt in America. Bloomberg reports it filed confidentially for a US IPO on August 7, 2026 with five bulge-bracket banks, a listing possible in November, an a16z-led ~$2B private round near $50B, and Ben Horowitz joining the board; Reuters puts the IPO target close to $80B including debt. What the public record cannot tell you is whether the business has grown 5× or 10× since its last audited year — FY2021 revenue $592M, adjusted EBITDA $315M — because nothing consolidated has been disclosed since. What it can tell you is that the financing has: $24B+ raised since 2024, leverage that rating agencies now call "elevated," CoreWeave at a fifth of rated-pool rent, and a Nevada power-and-water politics problem that is getting louder. The S-1 will settle the $50B-versus-$80B argument. Until then, this is the highest-quality and highest-stakes IPO candidate in the series.
The Numbers at a Glance
1 · Business Overview
Twenty-six years of one man's data-center design — now an AI factory franchise
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2000 · Las Vegas, Nevada · NYSE: SWCH 2017–2022 |
| Founder & CEO | Rob Roy (950+ patents granted or pending attributed to his designs) |
| President / CFO | Thomas Morton · Madonna Park (CFO since at least March 2025) |
| Owners | DigitalBridge (majority) · IFM Investors · Aware Super ($500M, 2023) · a16z-led round reported |
| Take-Private | $34.25/share · ~$11B incl. debt · announced May 11, closed Dec 6, 2022 |
| Sponsor Event | SoftBank Group acquiring DigitalBridge (~$4B EV, announced Dec 29, 2025; close expected H2 2026) |
| Campuses | Core (Las Vegas) · Citadel (Tahoe Reno) · Keep (Atlanta) · Pyramid (Grand Rapids) · Rock (Austin) · Pennsylvania (announced Apr 2026) |
| Operating Footprint | 20+ data centers across six metros (DBRS, Mar 2026) · ~20 more under construction (Fitch, Feb 2025) |
| Last Audited P&L | FY2021: revenue $592.0M · adj. EBITDA $315.1M · net income $14.8M · capex $455.7M |
| Customers | NVIDIA, Dell, FedEx (Reuters) · CoreWeave · 550+ in the securitized pool |
| Employees | ~1,200 |
| Consolidated 2023–2026 Financials | Not disclosed |
Switch was the public market's odd one out in its first life — an Up-C-structured, founder-controlled Las Vegas operator that built to its own "Tier 5" standard, ran on 100% renewable power from 2016, and traded at a discount to Equinix for it. The thesis that DigitalBridge paid $11B for in 2022 was land, power and design: multi-gigawatt campuses with the substations already energized. Three years later, that is the scarcest asset in American infrastructure, and the owners are bringing it back to market as an "AI factory" franchise — Rob Roy's EVO hybrid-liquid-cooled design at up to 2 MW per rack, aligned to NVIDIA's DGX/MGX roadmaps, hosting CoreWeave's GB300 NVL72 clusters.
2 · Footprint & Moat
Gigawatt campuses with the power already procured — the thing money cannot buy quickly
| Campus | Location | Scale (disclosed) | Status / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Core | Las Vegas, NV | Up to 495 MW at full build | Flagship; LAS.07/.09 in the 2025 CMBS; LAS 10–11 in ABS 2025-1; 300+ acres added at Apex + 54 acres south valley in 2026 |
| The Citadel | Tahoe Reno, NV | 600+ MW planned; 52 MW asset in ABS 2026-1 | Largest campus; lost the Tract land-covenant suit (Oct 2025); Reno moratorium (May 2026) on new approvals |
| The Keep | Atlanta / Cartersville, GA | 150 MW + Keep 2.0: $772M, 126 acres | Phase 1 Q2 2026; build-out to 2046 |
| The Rock | Austin / Round Rock, TX | Texas 1 24 MW · Texas 2 36 MW · 1.5M+ sq ft adjacent to Dell HQ | Data Foundry sites (Austin/Houston) acquired 2021 for $420M |
| The Pyramid | Grand Rapids, MI | n/d | In ABS master trust since 2024-1 |
| Pennsylvania | Beaver County (NW of Pittsburgh) | 382 acres | Announced Apr 30, 2026; no MW/cost/timeline; closed-loop "zero water" cooling |
The moat thesis rests on four pillars:
- Energized land at gigawatt scale — two gigawatt-class campuses in Nevada, thousands of acres, and the substations, transmission and generation obligations backed by a first-of-its-kind $2.6B letter-of-credit facility (April 2026). Power interconnection queues are the binding constraint on AI capacity; Switch bought its place in line a decade ago.
- Design IP and the Tier 5 standard — 950+ patents, 2N+1 electrical, N+1 cooling, water-free cooling in Las Vegas, and the EVO AI Factory at densities up to 2 MW/rack. Fitch treats the Tier 5 designation as resiliency above Uptime's Tier IV Gold.
- Power procurement optionality — 100% renewable since 2016; a non-binding 12 GW Oklo master power agreement through 2044; a 13 MW Ormat geothermal PPA (2030); a $1.9B Schneider Electric supply-capacity agreement. Not all of it is firm, but the pipeline is broader than any peer of its size.
- A fully contracted pipeline — the company's phrase in July 2025, June 2026 and April 2026; the rated CMBS pool is 100% occupied with 650 contracts. Contracted demand is what lets $24B of financing be raised against a business that has not published a P&L in three years.
3 · Financials — Audited Baseline, Asset-Level Reality
The last number is from 2021; everything since is in rating-agency footnotes
Switch's last audited year as a public company: FY2021 revenue $592.0M (+16%), adjusted EBITDA $315.1M (Q4 margin 53.2%), capex $455.7M, net debt $1.6B at 4.7× annualized EBITDA. Its final quarterly filing put nine-month 2022 revenue at $507.3M — Q3 2022 $174.5M, roughly $698M annualized — against guidance of $660–674M for the full year. Then the Form 15 was filed on December 16, 2022 and the disclosure stopped.
What the rating agencies see. Because Switch finances stabilized assets in the securitization market, the only post-2022 operating data is asset-level:
| Disclosure | Figure | Read-through |
|---|---|---|
| Fitch CMBS 2025-DATA (3 assets, 104.4 MW) | $2.40B debt · Fitch NCF $172.8M | ~$23.0M of debt per leased kW; Fitch value $2.0B at 8.625% cap |
| Fitch stressed metrics | DSCR 0.75× · LTV 119.8% | Aggressive by design at the Fitch stress; 1.05× / 85% through BBB- |
| Occupancy / contracts | 100% · 650 contracts | Enterprise colocation pool; PUE ≈1.2 |
| Largest tenant | CoreWeave 19.8% of base rent | Top-10 = 47.2%; investment-grade tenants 40.4% |
| Weighted average lease term | 3.2 years | Short for hyperscale; re-pricing exposure cuts both ways in an AI shortage |
| DBRS on ABS leverage | "low" (2024-1) → "elevated" (2026-1) | The master trust grew from inaugural to ~$4.2B across five series |
| Securitized pool (Apr 2026) | 11 data centers · 5 markets · 550+ customers | Stabilized assets only; the AI build-out sits outside the trusts |
The financing ledger tells the growth story the P&L cannot: ~$5B of new debt (Sep 2024), the $2.4B CMBS (Feb 2025), five ABS series totaling ~$4.2B (2024–Apr 2026), $4.5B of project financings, facilities expanded to $10B (Jul 2025) and then to "nearly $10B" of revolver plus LC (Jun 2026) — "more than $24 billion since 2024," with 100% of the take-private bank debt retired. DigitalBridge's own rule of thumb is ~$10B of total capital per gigawatt built, roughly half equity. Against that, the scale of borrowing implies multiple gigawatts in motion — and an EBITDA base that must be several multiples of 2021's to carry it.
4 · IPO Status & Timeline
Confidentially filed, five banks, a November window — and a $30B disagreement about the price
The sequence: September 2024, Reuters — owners exploring an IPO at ~$40B including debt. December 2025, SoftBank explores buying Switch outright for ~$50B; January 26, 2026, SoftBank walks away over financing and the "challenges it would have faced managing Switch's large network," while the IPO is re-floated at "up to $60B." March 2026, TMT Finance reports a private round in preparation. June 4, The Information — talks to raise billions at $50B+, Brookfield and KKR poised. July 1, Bloomberg — a16z leading a ~$2B round at a valuation approaching $50B including debt. July 13, Reuters — Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan hired; up to $10B raised; valuation close to $80B including debt. August 7, Bloomberg — confidential filing submitted; Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley; listing as soon as November; valuation "approaching $50B including debt"; Ben Horowitz joining the board.
This one is real — the question is the number, not the event
The critical nuance: unlike most names in this series, Switch has every IPO marker in place — a confidential DRS (reported), five bulge-bracket underwriters, a crossover round led by a16z that sets a private anchor near $50B, a board-level signal in Ben Horowitz, and a sponsor (DigitalBridge) whose own sale to SoftBank creates a reason to crystallize value. A confidential draft is not visible on EDGAR until ~15 days before the roadshow; as of August 21 there is no public S-1, and the old SWCH registrant (CIK 0001710583) ended with a Form 15 in December 2022.
- The $50B vs $80B gap is not noise — it is the difference between pricing off the a16z round and pricing off Vantage-style AI-infrastructure comps. Reuters' $80B came with "up to $10B" of proceeds; Bloomberg's $50B came with the filing. Expect the range to be set by the EBITDA the S-1 finally discloses.
- SoftBank's walk-away is informative: a strategic with unlimited AI ambition passed at ~$50B on financing and operational complexity. The IPO reopens that price to a broader book.
- Window risk is live — Csquare priced below range and fell on debut in August 2026; Vantage (~$100B), CyrusOne (2027) and DayOne are queued behind Switch. First out gets the scarcity premium.
Base case: pricing in Q4 2026 at $50–65B enterprise value including debt. Bull case: an $80B print if disclosed EBITDA clears ~$3.5B with a fully contracted multi-gigawatt pipeline. Bear case: a slip into 2027 if the data-center IPO queue saturates demand or Nevada power politics escalate.
5 · Competitive Landscape
Between the REITs and the neoclouds — and the private giants lining up behind it
| Competitor | Ticker | FY2025 Revenue | FY2025 Adj. EBITDA | Market Cap | QL Signal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Switch | Private · IPO filed* | n/d (FY21 $592M) | n/d (FY21 $315M) | $50–80B EV reported | — |
| Equinix | EQIX | $9.22B | $4.53B | $106.3B | Sell |
| Digital Realty | DLR | $6.11B | $3.34B | $71.2B | Neutral |
| CoreWeave | CRWV | $5.13B | $3.09B | $50.1B | Sell |
| Iron Mountain | IRM | $6.9B (DC $416M) | $2.57B | $36.3B | Neutral |
| Nebius | NBIS | ARR $1.2B · 2026 guide $3.0–3.4B | Q4 margin 24% | $60.9B | Strong Buy |
| Applied Digital | APLD | 9M FY26 $299M | FQ3 $44M | $8.0B | Buy |
| Aligned · Vantage · CyrusOne · QTS | Private | n/d | n/d | $40B · ~$100B IPO talk · $15B · $10B | — |
Switch sits in the gap between two public cohorts. The REITs (Equinix, Digital Realty) are interconnection-rich, globally diversified and growing high single digits; the neoclouds (CoreWeave, Nebius) are growing several-fold but rent capacity — CoreWeave is Switch's largest rated-pool tenant. Switch is the landlord to the neocloud at hyperscale density, which is why the private market has paid $40B for Aligned and is floating ~$100B for Vantage. The real competition for Switch's IPO dollars is that queue.
6 · The Nevada Problem
Power, water and a lost lawsuit in the state that holds the crown jewels
Two gigawatt campuses in a state that is starting to say no
Switch's scarcity value is Nevada — the Core and the Citadel are its two gigawatt-class campuses. Nevada's politics around large loads moved fast in 2026: NV Energy sued Tract (July 24) over large-load cost allocation at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center and projects data centers at 64% of its sales by 2046; the PUCN large-load tariff is unsettled; Reno enacted a data-center moratorium (May 2026, through August 2027); Nye County imposed an emergency ban; and a statewide evaporative-cooling ban was floated after SNWA's 2023 ban. Switch's Las Vegas cooling is water-free and its Pennsylvania design is closed-loop, which is the right answer — but the permitting climate for new Nevada capacity has turned.
- The Tract judgment: Switch sued over a 2015 TRIC colocation covenant and lost on all claims (final judgment for Tract, October 2025) — a competitor now builds next door at the Citadel.
- The mitigant is the balance sheet: the $2.6B LC facility exists precisely to back transmission and generation commitments; the 12 GW Oklo MPA, Ormat geothermal and Schneider supply agreement are attempts to own the power problem rather than wait on the utility.
- Diversification is under way — Georgia's Keep 2.0, Texas, Michigan and the new Pennsylvania campus reduce Nevada concentration over the build-out horizon, but not by the November window.
Why it matters for the IPO: the valuation is a multiple on contracted megawatts that can actually be energized on schedule. Nevada interconnection and cooling politics are the single largest non-financial variable in that number.
7 · Valuation Framework
What $50B and $80B each require the S-1 to show
| Metric | Value | Comp / Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Last confirmed transaction | $11B EV | Dec 2022 take-private · $34.25/share |
| Reported IPO valuation (incl. debt) | $50–80B | Bloomberg Aug 7 (~$50B) · Reuters Jul 13 (~$80B) |
| Last audited adj. EBITDA | $315M (FY2021) | 53% Q4 margin · 4.7× net leverage then |
| Peer equity multiples (cap / adj. EBITDA) | 14–24× | IRM 14.1× · CRWV 16.2× · DLR 21.3× · EQIX 23.5× |
| EBITDA required at $50B EV | ~$2.1–3.1B | 16× → $3.1B · 24× → $2.1B · i.e. 7–10× FY2021 |
| EBITDA required at $80B EV | ~$3.3–5.0B | 16× → $5.0B · 24× → $3.3B · i.e. 11–16× FY2021 |
| Private-deal anchors | — | Aligned $40B (Oct 2025) · AirTrunk ~$16B (2024) · CyrusOne $15B (2022) · QTS $10B (2021) |
| Consolidated debt | Undisclosed | ≥ $2.4B CMBS + ~$4.2B ABS + $4.5B project + drawn facilities |
The arithmetic is the thesis. Applying the listed peers' 16–24× to the reported range, a $50B enterprise value needs roughly $2.1–3.1B of current EBITDA; $80B needs $3.3–5.0B — against a last audited figure of $315M in 2021 and a 2022 run-rate around $370M. DigitalBridge's ~$10B-per-gigawatt capital rule and the $24B financing ledger say the build is real; whether it has stabilized into that much EBITDA by the filing date is the single question the S-1 answers. Fair-value triangulation under explicit assumptions:
- Bull case ($80B+ EV): disclosed run-rate EBITDA above $3.5B, a fully contracted multi-gigawatt pipeline with hyperscaler anchors beyond CoreWeave, and the scarcity premium of being first out of the data-center IPO queue; priced off Vantage-style comps at 20×+.
- Base case ($50–65B EV): EBITDA in the $2.5–3.5B range, leverage acknowledged as elevated, pricing at 16–20× with a debt stack of $10B+ leaving $40–55B of equity value; consistent with the a16z anchor.
- Bear case ($35–45B EV, or a 2027 slip): stabilized EBITDA closer to $2B with the rest in construction, CoreWeave concentration and WALT discounted, Nevada permitting friction priced in, and a crowded window — still 3–4× the 2022 take-private.
8 · Key Risks
What public-market diligence will price in
| Risk | Severity | Mitigant |
|---|---|---|
| Leverage | High | Investment-grade-rated instruments on stabilized assets; take-private bank debt fully retired; but DBRS "elevated," Fitch stressed LTV 120% |
| Valuation-disclosure gap | High | Resolved by the S-1 — nothing consolidated since FY2021 |
| Nevada power & water politics | High | Water-free cooling; $2.6B LC for transmission/generation; Oklo, Ormat, Schneider; geographic diversification under way |
| Customer concentration (CoreWeave 19.8%) | Medium | 550+ customers in pool; top-10 47%; IG tenants 40%; NVIDIA, Dell, FedEx named |
| Short WALT (3.2 yrs) | Medium | Re-pricing is upside in a capacity shortage; downside if AI demand normalizes |
| Sponsor dynamics | Medium | DigitalBridge absorbed by SoftBank (pending); SoftBank walked from $50B; IFM / Aware exit timing unknown |
| IPO window / queue | Medium | Csquare priced below range (Aug 2026); Vantage, CyrusOne, DayOne behind — first-mover advantage |
| Litigation | Low–Medium | Tract judgment lost (Oct 2025); $35M settlement in FY2021; no ongoing material case found |
| Key-person (Rob Roy) | Low–Medium | Deep bench (Morton, Park, Burros, Edwards); design IP patented; Horowitz joining board |
9 · Pre-IPO Exposure Routes Today
The owner is being bought, the tenant is listed, and the window is months away
| Route | How | Caveats |
|---|---|---|
| DBRG | DigitalBridge — Switch's majority owner | Being acquired by SoftBank at $16.00/share (~$4B EV); upside capped at the deal price; QL engine Neutral |
| SoftBank Group (9984 / SFTBY) | Becomes the indirect controlling owner on closing (H2 2026) | Switch is immaterial inside a conglomerate; AI-infrastructure beta |
| CRWV (the tenant) | CoreWeave — 19.8% of Switch's rated-pool rent; hosts GB300 clusters at Switch | QL engine reads Sell; tenant credit ≠ landlord value |
| EQIX / DLR / IRM (the multiple) | The listed comps the IPO will be priced against | High-single-digit growers; EQIX and DLR read Sell/Neutral |
| Patience | Wait for the public S-1 flip (~15 days pre-roadshow) and the November window | Cleanest entry · range likely set by disclosed EBITDA |
Bottom Line
Switch is the most IPO-ready private infrastructure asset in America and the one with the widest disclosure gap: a confidential filing, five banks, a November window, an a16z anchor near $50B and a Reuters target near $80B — against a last audited year of $592M revenue and $315M EBITDA. The financing ledger ($24B+ since 2024), the rating-agency footnotes (100% occupied, CoreWeave-heavy, leverage "elevated") and DigitalBridge's $10B-per-gigawatt rule all say the build-out is multi-gigawatt and real. The S-1 has one job: show $2–5B of EBITDA and a pipeline that can be energized in Nevada on schedule. If it does, this is the defining AI data-center listing of 2026 and the scarcity premium goes to the first name out of the queue. If it does not, the a16z price is the ceiling, not the floor. For growth and infrastructure portfolios: high-conviction watchlist, entry at the roadshow range, and read the leverage and tenant-concentration pages before the growth pages.