As data center development accelerates across the United States, panelists at the Fort Worth Report “Informed Discussion: Data Centers in Fort Worth” converged on many ideas that cut through the noise. Featured panelists were Nikki Morris, TCU Ralph Lowe Energy Institute, Dr. Mohammad Islam, UT-Arlington, and myself. One of my major takeaways is that the information needed to bring transparency already exists. A challenge is organizing it into something communities and policymakers can actually use.
Some of my select highlights are offered and directions for the future follow. The video replay is at the end of the post.
From Repurposed Warehouses to Purpose-Built Campuses
Today’s data centers didn’t start out as data centers. From visits with two developers, originally with Digital Realty, I mentioned the industry’s roots in repurposing industrial-commercial real estate — defunct warehouses and old printing presses retrofitted to house early computing infrastructure. Today, a current wave of purpose-built, hyperscaler-financed campuses are reshaping local economies but other types of data centers exist in tandem.
The United States remains the epicenter of this build-out, capturing a disproportionate share of global data center development activity, nearly 80% according to a Cushman and Wakefield study. Hyperscalers—Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google are committing hundreds of billions of dollars annually to the build out, which are a primary engine behind the growth. Increasingly they are joined by a second category of builders, neo-clouds, but not exclusively so.
New Entrant Neo-Clouds