Anyone following industrial development knows that the United States has data center fever, and Dallas isn’t missing out on the building craze.
The California-based digital infrastructure company Equinix Inc. recently filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for more than $836 million in new construction and interior outfitting costs related to a new data center it is building at 1550 W Mockingbird Ln. between I-35 and Harry Hines Boulevard. Spanning 372,517 square feet across four floors, the data center will be the firm’s ninth in D-FW and its seventh in Dallas proper.
Credit: Google Street View (2020)
A two-story office and manufacturing building used to stand at the site, which previously housed Balfour Publishing (you know, the company that probably makes your kid’s school yearbook) before getting demolished earlier this year.
Equinix’s filings, which are preliminary, note the planned installation of 20 generators, five generator pads, and dunnage platforms for heavy equipment. As you might guess, data centers are pretty energy-intensive. That appears to be the cost of our tech-forward world these days.
Data centers are specialized industrial facilities that house servers and the other systems that keep digital services running. They provide the power, cooling, and connectivity needed at mass scale. While they’ve been critical for things like cloud computing, banking, streaming, and all things tech for years now, the corporate pursuit of advancements in AI have jacked up the need for data center services.
Numbers seem to vary wildly, but current counts put the number of data centers in the United States between 4,100 and 5,500. The range is probably due to differing statistical criteria, but regardless, there are way more here than in any other country in the world. Runners-up include Germany, China, and the United Kingdom, none of whom have cracked a thousand yet.
Earlier this year, JLL identified D-FW as the second-most in-demand market for data center services, coming in only behind northern Virginia. In the first half of 2025, total existing inventory in the Metroplex (measured in megawatts) increased by 47% year-over-year, according to CBRE. Luckily for businesses looking to colocate their servers and such, even more data center capacity is on the way. A CBRE report projects D-FW’s data center market will double in size by the end of 2026 when taking into account recently completed projects and those currently under construction.
Permit applications and site plans for Equinix’s planned data center on Mockingbird Lane are currently under review, with construction expected to start this coming February. Interior outfitting for the completed project is expected to wrap up by March 2028.