DALLAS — This story originally was published by our content partners at the Dallas Business Journal. You can read the original version here.
Construction on a 410,000-square-foot data center that appears to be part of a planned 45-acre campus in Garland could start early next year.
Digital Realty Trust Inc. plans to start construction on the facility at 1502 Ferris Road in March 2025 and deliver in October 2026, according to planning documents filed with the state. Construction on the data center is estimated to cost about $120 million, and the center will feature an office and six data halls generating eight megawatts of power, according to the Sept. 3 filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Architecture firm HED will be designing the facility.
Such TDLR filings are often preliminary, but provide a glimpse at a company's construction plans.
The new filing follows Garland City Council's Sept. 3 approval of incentives for the larger 45-acre complex that Austin-based Digital Realty is constructing at 1702 W. Campbell Road. The four-building complex known as Digital Realty Garland Datacenter in city documents is expected to total more than 1 million square feet. According to the documents, the company plans to invest more than $160 million per building.
The economic development agreement provides the complex with a 50% tax rebate for 20 years and a four-year, 40% rebate on business personal property and real estate taxes per phase of construction.
Another applicant tied to Digital Realty (NYSE:DLR) also received an incentive agreement for the construction of a 172,000-square-foot data center at 1505 Ferris Road, which appears to be the first phase of the data center campus.
The package provides the company with a rebate of development fees up to $500,000, a two-year rebate of 40% on business personal property taxes and a four-year rebate of 40% on real estate taxes. The economic development agreement requires the company to develop the building by the end of 2025. The tenant is expected to invest an additional $328 million at full build-out, according to city documents.
A spokesperson for Digital Realty declined to provide additional details about the Garland campus and instead pointed to a March press release where the company announced its joint venture with Mitsubishi Corp. to support the development of two, 100% pre-leased data centers in the Dallas metro.
Construction on both facilities began in the fourth quarter of 2022, and the first phase of the project is anticipated to be completed later this year, according to the announcement. Mitsubishi acquired a 65% equity interest in the venture while Digital Realty will manage the development and daily operations of the ventures and maintains a 35% interest.
Digital Realty has a global data center presence that includes more than 300 facilities in over 50 metros across more than 25 countries, according to its LinkedIn. The organization relocated its head office to Austin from San Francisco in 2021.
Dallas-Fort Worth is the second largest data center market with 591 megawatts in inventory, 41.3 megawatts absorbed and about 472.1 megawatts under construction in the first half of the year, according to a recent data center trends report by CBRE. A boom of tenant demand and developer interest has transformed vast swaths of DFW with large, power-hungry facilities to support the artificial intelligence boom and more high-tech computing.
