Data center demand is booming in North Texas. While many data centers go up in Collin County to service corporate relocations to the area, Provision Data Services has quietly rebuilt a data center in an unlikely location: downtown Dallas.
The 12-story building at 2020 Live Oak St. was an insurance agency office and a carrier hotel in its former lives. Provision bought it out of foreclosure a couple years ago and, in February, debuted it as a colocation center capable of 14 megawatts of power.
A few factors demonstrate why Downtown Dallas is a great place to put data, Provision Data Services CEO Clay Hill says. Dallas has spent a lot of capital on its power grid to allow facilities like PDS to achieve N+2 power. That designation is a technical way to say that power generation stations have high redundancy, so that if one station goes out, it has at least two backups. Because downtown power lines are buried, they are unlikely to go down during natural disasters. Downtown also experiences fewer harmful storms and weather occurrences due to the urban heat island effect.
For companies located or looking to locate in the central business district, proximity to data can be a high line item. As more and more areas near the CBD attempt to woo the tech behemoth Amazon in its RFP for a second headquarters, Provision Data Services could become more integral to the continuing discussions.
The 137,000-square-foot center has already signed a couple of household name tenants. (Passersby may notice Verizon’s iconic red checkmark painted on the walls of the parking garage.) Could Amazon be next?
