Aligned Data Centers plans to build a 450,000-square-foot facility in North Texas to add to its Dallas-area inventory.

The Plano Planning and Zoning Commission on Monday approved a request from the company for a specific use permit for an electrical substation near the 44-acre North Star Road property and its preliminary site plan.

The East Plano location would be the Plano company’s third data center in the area. The other two are on Summit Avenue on a combined 38 acres, and they span almost 600,000 square feet.

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Meanwhile, as QTS Realty Trust expands its footprint in North Texas, Blackstone, the company that owns the data center giant, is counting on the continued development of AI platforms to drive growth, The Dallas Express has reported.

Blackstone, a $1 trillion company based in New York, acquired QTS in 2001 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.

Also, 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, according to the newspaper.