Anthony Bolner of Stream Data Centers has been in the industry for 20+ years. On this episode he breaks down his view of the current Dallas data center market with our CEO, David Liggitt.

This is an episode of HawkTalk, datacenterHawk’s series of candid one on one conversations with executives and leaders in the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe here.

If you’re short on time, you’ll find a few quick takeaways from our conversation as well as links to what we talked about below.

Recent hyperscale activity indicates a healthy outlook for Dallas

Dallas has always had a healthy enterprise demand but in the past two to three years we’ve seen multiple hyperscalers and cloud service providers enter the market. It certainly isn’t at the scale of other markets but we view it as a strong indicator of future growth.

Comparatively low economic costs in Dallas make it an attractive market

The cost of doing business in Dallas makes it an attractive market for data center operators. Electricity in Dallas can run under $0.045/kwh which is among the lowest in the nation. Oncor is the primary electricity provider in the market and has made good paths to renewable resources, which continues to grow in importance particularly for cloud providers. The cost of living, labor market, and availability of land also make Dallas attractive.

Dallas suburbs are seeing more data center development than downtown

Twenty years ago the Dallas data center market centered around the carrier hotels. Lately though it’s become a suburban development game as the industry seeks larger sites and bigger floor plans. Campuses continue to grow in popularity because it provides additional flexibility around the scale and timing of bringing capacity to market. Hyperscalers are creating large dark fiber paths which leads providers to build data centers based off the proximity to these key players. Even with extensive land in the suburbs, Dallas is starting to see two story designs come into the market, which was previously unthinkable.

Stream continues to expand even during COVID-19

Stream has continued to expand by leaning heavily on their processes and procedures. They’ve continued with construction on 4.5 MW in Phoenix with an eye to eventually scale up to 200 MW. They’re under construction on 3.5 MW in Chicago and for end users, currently have product available in Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Minneapolis among other markets.

We also talked about…

• How the Dallas data center market has changed over the years
• How data center users think about the facilities they will go into
• What the key indicators will be in Dallas moving forward

Don’t forget to check out the rest of our HawkTalks and don’t miss out on our latest release of market data for the data center industry.