T5 and Iconiq’s IPI Plan Campus around Facebook Data Center in Texas

T5 Data Centers and its equity investor IPI Data Center Partners Management have teamed up with developer Hillwood Investment Properties to build a sprawling data center campus around the recently built Facebook server farm in north Fort Worth, part of the hot Dallas-Fort Worth data center market.

IPI, a data center-oriented real estate fund manager, is co-sponsored by Iconiq Capital, a wealth management company whose client list consists of some of Silicon Valley’s richest and most well-known people, including Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman, and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.

The future campus will be part of AllianceTexas, Hillwood’s 18,000-acre master-planned development. Hillwood – founded by Ross Perot Jr., son of the Texas billionaire Ross Perot – has set aside 400 acres at AllianceTexas for T5 and IPI’s data center campus, the Dallas Business Journal reported.

A map of AllianceTexas data center sites shows plots of land earmarked for data center construction to the north and to the south of Facebook’s facilities:

The partners are marketing “pad sites” connected to critical infrastructure to companies looking to build data centers in the Dallas market.

In a statement, Reid Goetz, the AllianceTexas VP responsible for data centers, industrial, and office development, said, “The massive pad sites at T5@Alliance, which are already served with critical infrastructure, makes the development a great platform on which the partners can create one of the world's top data center destinations.”

Dallas-Fort Worth is one of the hottest data center markets in the US and in the world. Even after companies leased 22MW of data center capacity in the first half of this year (this doesn’t include Facebook’s or other company-owned data centers), there’s still pent-up demand in the region, according to a recent market report by CBRE.

When there is pent-up demand in a market with tight supply, pre-approved “pad sites” will be attractive to data center builders wanting to cater to that demand, since speed-to-market will be essential. Also attractive will be AllianceTexas’s access to two separate energy providers: Brazos Electric Power Cooperative and Oncor.

There are 10 multi-tenant data centers under construction in the Dallas market at the moment, totaling almost 50MW of capacity, according to CBRE. One of those projects is a 1.5MW facility in nearby Plano by T5 itself.