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Metro guide · Dallas–Fort Worth

Colocation in Dallas–Fort Worth: the Infomart, the suburbs, and what is still being built

Dallas is the most operator-diverse market in this library and the easiest to misread. One building downtown holds three competing operators and the metro's internet exchange. The suburbs hold a genuinely deep mid-tier that almost never surfaces in a search result. And a large share of the capacity being talked about here has not been built yet.

Read this first: square footage is not sellable space#

Every operator roster you will read for this metro — including the tables below — quotes building square footage. That is not the space you can buy, and in Dallas the gap is unusually well documented.

This matters more in Dallas than elsewhere because the metro's rosters are unusually complete — twelve operator-published Digital Realty codes with street addresses, for instance — which makes the numbers feel more precise than they are.

The Infomart: one building, three operators, one exchange#

1950 North Stemmons Freeway is the single most useful address in this market to understand. It carries more than fourteen sellable site codes across three operators, and it hosts the metro's internet exchange.

Operators with sellable colocation inside or adjacent to the Dallas Infomart.
OperatorSite codesPublished capacityWorth knowing
CologixDAL1, DAL2, DAL3Not publishedDAL1 hosts DE-CIX Dallas — the strongest facility-level ecosystem fact in this metro. That is an internet exchange, not a cloud on-ramp; the two are different products. Cologix's cloud access runs through its own marketplace at market level rather than as a confirmed on-ramp in this building.
FlexentialDAL0180,447 sq ft · 6.66 MW — for the downtown Dallas hall onlyRead those figures carefully. DAL01 is one site code covering five separate building and suite listings under a campus umbrella, which is Flexential's counting convention. Both figures are third-party sourced, not Flexential-published.
EquinixDA1–DA4, DA6, DA7, DA9–DA12Not publishedGROUPED ROW: ten site codes carried as one, described as the Infomart plus adjacent Equinix-built buildings. No per-code address, square footage, power or building assignment exists publicly, and the row is deliberately ambiguous between inside the Infomart and adjacent to it.

Two practical consequences. First, you can put three competing operators in the same building into the same bid and compare them on price, term, service and commercial posture with the fibre held constant — which is a genuinely unusual position for a buyer and worth exploiting. Second, an address is not an operator: any directory or search result that dedupes by address will merge these three into one, and any that treats a site code as unique across operators will make the opposite error.

The rest of the operator landscape#

Verified against operator-published material as of 26 August 2026. Dallas–Fort Worth is genuinely a multi-city market: Richardson, Plano, Carrollton, Lewisville, Allen and Fort Worth are all distinct submarkets, and the city is named on every row below.

Digital Realty — the most enumerated roster in the metro#

Twelve operator-published site codes with street addresses, and unlike its Northern Virginia roster, the retail-versus-wholesale split here is stated by the operator rather than inferred. Power figures are not published for any of them.

Digital Realty in DFW. Square footage is building size — see the warning above.
SiteCityAddressBuilding sq ftType
DFW10Dallas2323 Bryan Street387,500Retail / interconnection — downtown carrier-hotel heritage and the highest-interconnect DFW asset in the roster
DFW36Dallas8435 N Stemmons Freeway35,000Retail / interconnection. NOT the Infomart — that is 1950 N Stemmons, a separate address on the same freeway
DFW11Carrollton4025 Midway Rd99,500Wholesale
DFW12Carrollton2440 Marsh Lane139,000Wholesale
DFW16Richardson1232 Alma Road106,500Wholesale
DFW17Richardson900 Quality Way115,000Wholesale. Next door to DataBank's DFW2 at 904 Quality Way — two operators, two buildings, one street
DFW18Richardson1210 Integrity Drive464,500Wholesale / hyperscale
DFW25Richardson1215 Integrity Drive118,000Wholesale. Across the street from DFW18
DFW28Richardson850 E Collins Boulevard121,500Wholesale
DFW29Richardson950 E Collins Boulevard121,500Wholesale
DFW35Richardson907 Security Row139,000Wholesale
DFW26Lewisville2501 State Highway 121831,500Wholesale / hyperscale — the largest DFW building in the roster

The mid-tier — where most buyers under a megawatt should be looking#

This is the part of the Dallas market that search results and AI answers systematically miss, and it is deep enough that omitting it materially changes what a bid produces.

Mid-tier and regional operators across the DFW submarkets.
OperatorSiteCityPublished detailWorth knowing
DataBankDFW1Dallas400 S Akard St, Suite 100 — sq ft and power not publishedDataBank's headquarters building and the former Federal Reserve Bank; the company was founded here in 2005. Cloud access is through an interconnection partner rather than a direct cross-connect.
DataBankDFW2Richardson904 Quality Way — sq ft and power not publishedNext door to Digital Realty's DFW17.
DataBankDFW3Plano8375 Dominion Parkway — sq ft and power not publishedConfirmed FedRAMP Moderate authorisation — one of only three DataBank facilities with a confirmed ATO, and the single highest-value attribute in the Dallas set for a federal or federal-adjacent requirement. Verify the authorisation is current and covers your scope before committing.
TierPointDallasDallas3004 Irving BoulevardTierPoint publishes no site-code scheme, so its own facility name is the identifier. Square footage cannot be attributed per site — the only public figure is 305,000 sq ft across the whole Texas portfolio. TierPoint's self-published roster held up exactly against an independent rebuild, one of the most reliable counts in our corpus.
TierPointDallas - AllenAllen820 Allen Commerce ParkwayPart of the same unsplit Texas total. Three operators are in Allen: TierPoint here, CyrusOne's campus, and a Csquare site we deliberately did not verify.
TierPointDallas - Fort WorthFort Worth13701 Independence ParkwayAcquired January 2024. Two square-footage figures that do not reconcile: 208,000 sq ft cited at acquisition, against a 305,000 sq ft combined Texas portfolio also meant to cover Dallas and Allen. An 18 MW figure attached to this site is explicitly long-term potential, not delivered capacity.
EvocativeDAL1PlanoAddress not publishedPlano per Evocative's own directory, though its facility URL still reads "dallas-tx-data-center" — the operator directory outranks the URL. Internap-heritage asset. Not to be confused with Cologix's DAL1 in the Infomart.
EvocativeDAL6PlanoAddress not publishedCompliance certifications and LEED are confirmed on this facility's own page as of June 2026 — one of the few facility-scoped compliance confirmations in this metro.
FlexentialDallas–Plano campusPlanoAddress and site code not publishedSeeded under the operator's campus name because the public record contradicts itself on the site code. Hosts a 13 MW CoreWeave GPU deployment as of April 2025 — that is a tenant, not an on-ramp, but it is real evidence the campus supports high-density deployments.
365 Data CentersRichardson, TXRichardsonAddress not publishedMetro name as identifier — 365 publishes no site codes. Ex-Sungard Availability Services, acquired November 2022, and a separate asset from the ex-Equinix Dallas site 365 previously held and exited. No native cloud on-ramp at any 365 facility. Compliance attestations date to a 2015–16 cycle covering an estate 365 no longer owns — ask for a current one.

Wholesale and hyperscale#

CyrusOne's delivered DFW estate. No addresses, square footage or power are published for any of them.
SiteCityWorth knowing
DFW1CarrolltonEffectively non-retail before the channel question arises: no self-service product, no published cabinet pricing, no minimum-order information. CyrusOne runs its own referral programme rather than selling through advisory channels — approach directly. Shares the DFW1 label with DataBank's downtown building; different operators.
DFW2LewisvilleSame city as Digital Realty's DFW26; different operators, different buildings. No facility detail published.
DFW3–DFW5 (Allen campus)AllenGROUPED ROW: three codes given as a single entry with no per-code detail. DFW6 is absent from the sequence with no explanation — not backfilled, and not assumed retired.

What is pipeline, not capacity you can buy#

A large share of the Dallas capacity being discussed publicly has not been delivered. These are excluded from the tables above and named here so the exclusion is visible.

  • DataBank's Red Oak campus in South Dallas — a 480 MW, 292-acre, eight-building programme. DFW9, DFW10 and DFW11 represent 180 MW across 600,000 sq ft with a Q2 2026 ready-for-service target. A DFW8 carries a 265,000 sq ft figure as the first Red Oak building, but no source we hold states it is operational, and the campus is described throughout as construction-phase. This is the largest single block of future Dallas capacity and it is future.
  • CyrusOne DFW7 in Fort Worth — a 200 MW hyperscale build under construction. A separate Bosque County site is both under construction and roughly a hundred miles outside the metro.
  • Flexential's Talty site in Kaufman County — announced July 2026, site work from early 2027, first customer availability late 2028. No site code exists.

Pipeline is not a criticism — Dallas's development pace is one of the reasons to look here. But planned capacity is not capacity you can buy, and an operator quoting you against a 2027 delivery is selling a different product from one quoting space that is energised today. Ask which you are being offered, and what happens to your price and your obligations if the date slips.

Network and cloud ecosystem#

Dallas is a major interconnection market, and its ecosystem concentrates unusually tightly in one place.

DE-CIX Dallas is hosted at Cologix's DAL1 in the Infomart. That is the metro's strongest facility-level ecosystem fact and the clearest reason to weigh Infomart buildings for peering-dependent architectures. Note what it is: an internet exchange for peering with other networks, not a private on-ramp into a cloud provider. Buyers routinely conflate the two.

Downtown carrier-hotel heritage also sits at Digital Realty's DFW10 on Bryan Street, which its own operator characterises as the highest-interconnect asset in its Dallas roster.

Cloud on-ramps: what is actually confirmed#

Less than the marketing implies, and the honest answer is worth stating precisely.

  • Dallas is a named Equinix AWS Direct Connect metro, but no source we hold names the AWS region involved. We carry the metro-level fact and decline to name a region we cannot verify.
  • Flexential Fabric reaches AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle from its Dallas sites over its own backbone. This is network reachability rather than a same-building on-ramp, and Flexential's own documentation is explicit about the distinction.
  • Cologix's cloud access runs through its own marketplace at market level. Across its entire 49-site roster only one facility — in Vancouver, not Dallas — carries a facility-specific AWS confirmation.
  • DataBank, TierPoint, Evocative and 365 all reach the clouds through an interconnection partner such as Megaport, PacketFabric or Console Connect rather than a direct cross-connect in their Dallas buildings. For TierPoint, Seattle is its only facility anywhere with a confirmed direct AWS on-ramp; for 365, no native on-ramp exists at any facility in its portfolio.

None of that makes these operators wrong — partner-mediated cloud connectivity is mainstream and works. It means the question "is the on-ramp for my cloud region physically in this building, or reached over your network?" produces a different answer for almost every operator in this metro, and you should ask it of each one.

When Dallas is the right metro — and when it is not#

It fits when#

  • You want genuine price competition. This is the strongest practical argument for Dallas. The operator set spans global, REIT, deep mid-tier and wholesale, several of them in the same buildings, and a bid run across those tiers produces real spread.
  • You need central US latency — roughly equidistant to both coasts, which makes Dallas a natural second site for an East or West Coast primary.
  • Your requirement is federal or federal-adjacent at Moderate level. DataBank's Plano facility carries a confirmed FedRAMP Moderate authorisation, which is scarce.
  • You need high-density or GPU capacity outside the coastal markets. There is delivered evidence of large GPU deployments in this metro, not just marketing.
  • Texas power and land economics matter to your model, and you can accept the state's own grid characteristics as part of the trade.

It does not fit when#

  • You need the deepest possible peering ecosystem. Dallas is strong and has DE-CIX; Northern Virginia is deeper. If peering breadth is the actual requirement, test both.
  • You need capacity now and the operator's answer is Red Oak, Talty or DFW7. Those are 2026-to-2028 stories. Confirm what is energised.
  • Grid resilience is a board-level concern and you have not yet worked through what that means for a Texas deployment. It is answerable, but it should be answered explicitly rather than assumed.
  • You need one operator across several continents. Most of the interesting operators in this metro are US-only.

When the big brands are the right answer#

Equinix is the right answer in Dallas when you need its interconnection ecosystem and its global contract, and its Infomart-adjacent presence puts it in the metro's densest location. Digital Realty is the right answer for scale, for wholesale requirements across the Richardson and Lewisville corridors, and for DFW10 specifically when downtown interconnection heritage matters. Cologix is the right answer when DE-CIX access is the requirement — it hosts the exchange.

What Dallas punishes is not choosing a large operator. It is running a three-name bid in a market where six or eight operators would genuinely have competed, and never finding out what the other five would have said.

Pricing context for Dallas#

No operator in this market publishes a rate card, which is true of colocation everywhere and worth restating because Dallas's operator diversity makes it tempting to assume someone must. Pricing is quote-only and sales-engineer-gated across every operator above. We publish no per-operator figures for the reasons in how to run a colocation bid.

For orientation, CBRE's H2 2025 North American report put retail colocation asking rates at roughly $196 per kW per month for 250–500 kW deployments against a record-low 1.6% North American vacancy rate. That is a continental blend and an asking rate, not a Dallas number and not a quote to expect.

The Dallas-specific point is structural rather than numerical. This metro has the widest tier spread of any market in this library, and several operators sit in the same buildings competing for the same deployments. That combination is where competitive bidding produces the most value — more than in a market where the realistic list is three global operators with similar cost structures. If you run one properly-specified bid across tiers anywhere, run it here.

What this page deliberately does not tell you#

Who has space, and what it costs. Every figure above describes a building or a published capacity, never what is unallocated. In a metro with this much construction under way, the gap between "a campus exists" and "you can have some of it" is especially wide.

It is answerable only by asking each operator, at the moment you need to know, against your actual requirement — and recording who answered what, who declined, and when. The sample reports show what that produces.