In a meeting with local officials on Aug. 31, 2023, tech giant Google announced an initial investment of $330 million for a multi-year data center project. According to The Dallas Morning News, Google expects the project’s cost to rise above $600 million over several years.
The company hopes for the new data center to help power the increasing digital demand of consumers using Google’s products and cloud services. This would be the second Google’s second site in Texas, after injecting $600 million into Ellis County in 2019 for a 375-acre data center facility in Midlothian.
“The $300-plus million capital investment being made by Google in the City of Red Oak is significant,” Lee McCleary, director of economic development for Red Oak told The Dallas Morning News. “It creates well-paying jobs and the Google data center further validates Red Oak as being the preferred destination for industries conducting business in advanced technology sectors.”
According to McCleary, the 285,000 square feet data center will take two years to complete. While only 30 full-time employees will be needed to operate the center once construction is finished, it’s expected that nearly 1,200 construction jobs will be created as the facility is built.
An annual report released in March by commercial property firm Cushman & Wakefield found that the Dallas-Fort Worth area is among the top ten data center markets in the world. At the end of 2022, there were more than 2.2 million square feet of data center projects in development for the area and by mid-2023 the firm reported over 800,000 extra square feet were under construction.
In Collin County, CoreWeave, a leading cloud provider specializing in handling large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, is expected to complete its $1.6 billion data center in Plano by December 2023 while NTT Data’s $50 million expansion project in Garland is set to be completed in 2024.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, attended the announcement at The Shops in RedBird in Dallas on Thursday and said Google’s investment comes at the right time in an increasingly digital world.
“This is going to be part of the rejuvenation of this part of North Texas,” Cornyn said (via The Dallas Morning News). “This sends a great message that we’re open for business.”
