DataBank Secures $2B Construction Loan For Red Oak Data Centers
A Dallas-based company locked down $2B in construction financing for a trio of data centers it is building just south of the metro.
DataBank secured a massive loan to construct the first three facilities at its 300-acre data center campus in Red Oak. The data centers will total 600K SF and deliver 180 megawatts to help power artificial intelligence workloads and traditional computing processes, according to a company press release.
“This financing, combined with existing power commitments, accelerates DataBank’s construction and delivery timelines for this campus by approximately 18 months,” DataBank President and Chief Financial Officer Kevin Ooley said in a statement. “It ensures our customer will be able to bring critical capacity to market on time and further solidifies Dallas as a core metro for Internet and A.I. infrastructure.”
The three data centers, each already leased, will be the first of eight such facilities at the Red Oak campus.
Filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation show DataBank is spending a combined $837M to construct the data centers to be known as DFW9, DFW10 and DFW11.
Each facility is slated to be two stories tall with an office component. DFW9, which started construction in 2024, is expected to be finished next year, while the other two have 2028 completion dates.
The $2B loan is the largest DataBank has ever received and brings its financing total over the past year to $4.7B, with previous announcements of a $1.6B credit facility expansion and extension and a $1.1B hyperscale securitization.
MUFG Bank Ltd. served as administrative agent, coordinating lead arranger and sole bookrunner on the deal. However, it was also supported by a group of digital infrastructure banks and institutional investors.
DataBank’s legal adviser for the transaction was Davis Polk.
Texas has become a favorite destination for data center developers due to its “abundant energy resources, ample land availability and a business-friendly operating environment,” according to JLL’s North America 2025 year-end data center report.
The state is on pace to pass Virginia by the end of the decade as the nation’s biggest data center market, the report states. Texas had around 4 gigawatts of data center capacity and another 6.5 GW under construction when the report was released in February.
With roughly 2.4 GW of capacity, Dallas-Fort Worth is the largest data center zone in Texas, followed by Austin with 1.7 GW.
Despite all the capacity on the way, the industry is facing a shortage of fiber technicians amid the national AI-driven data center boom.
Dallas-based CBRE announced plans Monday to team with Meta Platforms on a new program to train thousands of fiber technicians to build next-generation data center infrastructure. Program graduates will have the chance to work on Meta’s data center construction efforts.
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has nearly 30 data centers in operation or under construction as well as more projects in the planning stages.
