Gigabit Fiber, a Downtown Dallas-based wireless internet infrastructure company, has secured a majority investment from the New York-based private equity firm Blue Owl Capital, Gigabit Fiber announced on Monday.
Under the terms of the deal Blue Owl will take a 51% stake, Tom Spackman, Gigabit Fiber’s CEO, told The Dallas Morning News. The dollar amount of the deal was undisclosed, and Spackman declined to provide further insight on the price, although he said Gigabit Fiber management is staying in place and had signed five-year agreements related to the investment.
“We’re going to use their expertise and capital to go leverage our business plan,” he said, “which is really supporting the large hyperscalers and data center projects that are happening all over the metroplex.”
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Gigabit Fiber, a firm that’s based in Dallas’ old Federal Reserve Building at 400 S. Akard St., operates some 500 route miles of high-capacity fiber networks that connect more than 50 data centers. In addition to D-FW, the company has a presence in Austin, El Paso, San Antonio and South Texas.
The deal also has implications for D-FW’s broader push into artificial intelligence, because the vast computing power required to drive the technology comes from data centers. North Texas is rapidly emerging as a new national financial hub and seen an influx of tech and AI-related infrastructure and economic activity. One recent report from the Brookings Institution found the region had added over 22,000 AI-related jobs last year and ranked 13th among U.S. metros for overall AI economic growth.
Blue Owl is a private equity investment firm and counts over $280 billion in assets under management. Internet software and services account for the firm’s largest asset category, at 11% of its portfolio, followed by healthcare and the food and beverage industry.
In a statement, Chris Jensen, Blue Owl’s managing director of digital infrastructure, framed the deal as a partnership between the asset manager’s existing data center presence and Gigabit Fiber’s digital infrastructure capabilities. “Texas and New Mexico continue to be a region of incredible interest for our hyperscale customers,” he added.
Spackman drew a connection between D-FW’s historical importance as a major land connection and its modern day role as an emerging role as a cloud computing and data hub.
“Dallas has been an interconnector dating back to the railroad,” he said. “This market is very important to the world ecosystem.”