Toward the beginning of October, QTS Realty Trust announced the opening of its newest Texas data center. The Dallas-Fort Worth facility was established after the company purchased and retrofitted a former semiconductor plant between the two Texas metropolitan hubs last year. Now, after considerable construction and repurposing, customers have begun moving into the space.
QTS officially opened Phase I of the Dallas-Fort Worth data center on Oct. 15. Currently, customers have leased 26,000 square feet of space in the facility, which includes 700,000 square feet of space overall. The company is also working to speed construction to ensure that Phase II capacity is available for clients early next year.
Even before the data center was fully completed, QTS pre-sold space within the facility, which will be capable of delivering 140 MW of power once fully completed. The Texas data center includes custom rooms ranging in size from 25,000 to 27,000 square feet.
"Our mega data center strategy combined with our redevelopment strategy has us excited by this asset," said Jim Reinhart, QTS chief operating officer, operations and development. "It's an infrastructure-rich facility with great power and fiber. It's also possible to double the size to 1.4 million square feet down the road with enough critical power to support."
This isn't the first time QTS has purchased a building with the intent of repurposing it and establishing a data center. The company also bought McGraw Hill's former New Jersey data center as well as a plant in Chicago previously used by the Sun Times with plans to create a new Illinois data center.
Currently, the Dallas area represents the fourth largest data center market in the U.S., making it an ideal location for QTS to expand its service footprint. The region is experiencing a considerable increase in demand for colocation data center space.
With the new Texas data center, QTS operates nearly 4 million square feet of facility space.
