Data Foundry hosted groundbreaking ceremony on April 10 to celebrate the launch of its second Houston data center, the company’s largest facility in the state. Due to the state’s natural climate and data center tax incentives, the Texas data center market has been steadily growing, including Data Foundry’s ongoing Houston initiative.
Houston Data Center Details: A Focus on Client Demands
Data Foundry’s Texas data center project began in 2013, when the organization purchased an 18-acre plot of land in the Houston area. The site will soon become its newest data center campus, called Houston 2.
The new facility, which will begin construction in April, will be a 350,000 square foot purpose-built data center. The Houston Business Journal reported that at first, plans for the facility included a 250,000 square foot structure, which was expanded by 100,000 square feet to better address the data storage demands of the local Houston business community.
Once completed, the new Texas data center will include 60,000 square feet of office space and the capacity to support up to 60 megawatts of critical power load at full capacity. Clients will also have access to more than 10 fiber carriers.
Construction for the facility will be completed in phases. The first phase includes the development of a 120,000 square foot building on the 18-acre site which is slated for completion in early 2015. If customer demands continue to increase, the Houston data center will then be built out to its full 350,000 square foot potential capacity.
The new data center will be built for flexibility, including the ability to support a single client cabinet to powering multi-megawatt deployments.
Other Texas Data Center Incentives
In addition to Data Foundry’s two Texas data centers, a number of other service providers operate facilities in the state, including CyrusOne and Digital Realty Trust.
Besides providing resources to address growing customer demands in the area, these vendors also enjoy the state’s mild climate. Houston specifically is outside the state’s well known Tornado Alley, providing a reliable region to support disaster recovery initiatives.
Furthermore, Texas officials recently revamped the state’s data center tax incentives to foster the success of the growing technology market in the region. In late 2013, legislators passed House Bill 1223. The measure, which aimed to make Texas a more attractive location for data center projects, enables facility developers and operators to benefit from 100 percent sales tax exemptions on business personal property for 10 to 15 years. In order to be eligible, organizations must have a minimum of 100,000 square feet of building area, invest at least $200 million in the project and create 20 new employment opportunities, according to Dallas Economic Development.
The state also offers other benefits for data center initiatives, including relatively low power costs, reliable fiber optic infrastructure, affordable real estate and a well-educated local workforce. Because a Texas data center can contribute anywhere from $500 million to $1.7 billion to the state’s economy, it is important that the state makes itself an attractive location within the data center market by offering beneficial resources.
