Digital Realty Cranks Up the Volume in Garland, Texas

Digital Realty Trust had been planning an enormous data center campus in Garland, Texas, a city northeast of Dallas and part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Now, it’s going to be even bigger than planned.

The city has given the San Francisco-based data center provider the go-ahead to add another 16 acres to the original 47.5-acre site. Including the expansion, the site can now support a data center campus with more than 160MW of critical load, city officials said in a statement.

With the city’s approval of the expansion, Digital now expects its capital investment in the campus to go up from $1 billion to $1.4 billion, according to Garland. The real estate investment trust (REIT), which first announced it would build a data center campus in Garland almost exactly a year ago, plans to spend that money over a 20-year period.

The DFW metroplex is one of the biggest and hottest data center markets in the US. But Garland became a player in the market only recently, joining its neighbors Richardson, Carrollton, Plano, Allen, and Dallas proper.

NTT Communications’ subsidiary RagingWire Data Centers was the first major data center operator to build a campus in Garland. The first phase on that campus, just around the corner from the Digital Realty site, went live last year, bringing 16MW of capacity to the market.

Related:Exclusive: RagingWire Takes Its Massive-Scale, Luxury-Amenities Data Center Model to Texas

Besides being part of the metroplex, Garland is attractive for big data center builds because it can leverage Garland Power and Light, its municipally owned utility (one of a handful in the state), to offer operators low energy rates. To further sweeten the pot for both RagingWire and Digital Realty, the city also agreed to give them tax breaks in exchange for their investment commitments.

RagingWire’s campus is expected to provide about 80MW of capacity once all four planned phases are complete.

Digital Realty’s campus, whose expected full-build capacity is now double that of its neighbor, expects to build in five phases, 32MW and 280,000 square feet each, Garland officials said.