Bandera, Skybox Plan 100-Acre Data Center Campus South Of Dallas
Dallas-based Bandera Ventures and Skybox Datacenters plan to jointly construct a multibuilding data center development in Lancaster, Texas.
The proposed campus, first reported by The Dallas Morning News, is planned for a more than 100-acre site located around 12 miles south of downtown Dallas and just east of Interstate 35E, a property recently acquired by Bandera.
The project will be the third such collaboration between Skybox and Bandera. The two companies previously co-developed data center campuses in Houston and Plano.
While Bandera Ventures is a significant player in the Dallas-Fort Worth development landscape — with 26 office, retail and light industrial properties across Texas — the company has little involvement in the data center space outside of its previous partnerships with Skybox.
But Skybox has made a habit of partnering with developers focused on other asset types, building facilities on land owned by logistics real estate giant Prologis on two sites near Austin and in Chicago’s Elk Grove Village.
Experts say developers of logistics parks and warehouses are increasingly eyeing the data center industry as potential uses for properties as the logistics sector has slowed from its pandemic-era boom.
The planned Lancaster campus is just the latest project in a Dallas-Fort Worth data center market that continues to be one of the country’s fastest-growing data center hubs. The market’s overall inventory has grown 247% since 2015, a growth rate trailing only Northern Virginia, according to CBRE. Leasing activity in the first half of last year shattered records, with a further 299.4 megawatts of capacity already under construction at the end of 2022.
The Skybox-Bandera campus in Lancaster sits right in what experts tell Bisnow will be prime territory for data center developers for the foreseeable future, with the bulk of new development occurring within a wedge framed by highways 67 and 45 and extending roughly 30 miles south of the city.
