As QTS Realty Trust expands its footprint in North Texas, the company that owns the data center giant is counting on the continued development of AI platforms to drive growth.
Blackstone, a $1 trillion company based in New York, acquired QTS in 2021 for $10 billion. QTS has since added 2 million square feet of data center space to its portfolio, including in Fort Worth.
According to a state filing, the two-story addition will span nearly 472,000 square feet on Park Vista Boulevard, The Dallas Express has reported. With a projected construction cost of $220 million, the project has an anticipated delivery date of April 1, 2026.
Meanwhile, the retrofitting of a QTS data center in Irving is expected to be complete in the spring as the company continues to build infrastructure on Longhorn Drive.
QTS of Overland Park, Kansas, announced in March the opening of a third data center for its 56-acre campus in Irving. A Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filing shows QTS is spending an estimated $32 million on demolition to add mechanical, engineering, and plumbing galleries and data halls, as well as to modify floors and ceilings. The project covers 136,565 square feet of the 700,000-square-foot property.
The Irving site — once a semiconductor plant — will eventually encompass about 2 million square feet, making it one of the largest data center campuses in North Texas, The Dallas Morning News reported in October. The DFW area is already one of the nation’s fastest-growing markets for data centers, with Google planning to build a $600 million data center in Red Oak, per the DMN.
QTS operates 28 data centers in 13 states and two others in the Netherlands. More will be built in markets where demand is not being met, according to Bloomberg, which reported that more buildings are needed to accommodate modern life. The rise of AI requires those properties to be built, which is why QTS has $15 billion worth of them in development.
Perhaps complicating the industry is the need for massive amounts of electricity. According to Bloomberg, QTS projects that its data centers will use about six gigawatts. To put that into perspective, one gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.
Data centers are used by companies to remotely store, distribute and process large amounts of information across computer networks. They require ample land, cooling systems, and electricity but contribute nothing to quality of life, which makes them unpopular and, at times, controversial.
Still, generative AI has created an increasing need for infrastructure to support it, Bloomberg reported, and Blackstone views data centers as an economically productive way to use capital.