Beauty And The Beasts: DFW Cities Are Turning Data Center MWs Into Commercial District Dollars

The city of Mansfield is proud of its Tree City USA designation given by the Arbor Day Foundation.

So when Aligned Data Centers came knocking last year with plans to build its more than 400K SF DFW-03 campus in the city of around 75,000 people, city officials made it known that increasing beautification efforts and replenishing the area's native trees were vital to the partnership.

Aligned went on to establish the Roots for the Future fund with the city to enhance sustainability for the community. City leaders also hope it will drive dollars to where they can best be put to use: beautifying Mansfield and boosting its municipal curb appeal to attract more business development.

Mansfield is among a wave of DFW-area cities to extract new dollars from billions in data center development, all aimed at growing commercial areas elsewhere within their borders.

“The Roots for the Future initiative … showcases how collaborative efforts can enhance the community while supporting the growth of critical infrastructure,” Aligned Executive Vice President Joanna Soucy said via email. “Beyond beautification, the 'gravity' of a data center like DFW-03 acts as a catalyst for economic development, attracting a diverse range of businesses to the area.”

Data centers aren’t generally known for enhancing the beauty of the cities in which they reside. They have developed a rap for being ugly, windowless boxes that sap water and drain power while creating few direct jobs. 

But the rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a data center development frenzy, and Texas is one of the nation's largest hubs for the activity. There were 279 data centers in the state as of late last year, according to the Texas comptroller, including 141 in Dallas-Fort Worth. At least another 10 are on the way to the Lone Star State with Stargate, a $500B joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to invest in U.S. AI infrastructure.

The dollars flowing into the sector have Mansfield and Metroplex municipalities like Red Oak and Garland turning megawatts into reinvestment opportunities to improve other infrastructure, beautify green space and grow their commercial districts.

Officials from those cities pointed to exponential growth in their taxable land value as well as the personal property tax values of the latest equipment and computer system upgrades at the facilities as some of the biggest benefits of housing data centers.

Diverting those dollars into projects that attract other businesses and industries creates a virtuous circle of economic growth, they said.

“It's a snowball effect. Beautification leads to more beautification and higher taxes,” CBRE Senior Vice President Brant Bernet said. “It just feeds on itself.”

Data centers create thousands of construction jobs. And they attract retailers and other industries to support the growth, according to Red Oak Mayor Mark Stanfill.

With $13B in data center investments underway, Red Oak has seen its total taxable land value quadruple due to those projects. It plans to channel new tax dollars to education, public safety, infrastructure and creating new recreation spaces, according to Stanfill.

In addition, Google, which is planning a $600M investment in its second Texas campus there, has donated $100K to help the city establish an interactive makerspace and another $150K to local schools to enhance science, technology, engineering and math education.

The three major data centers in Garland have a taxable land value of nearly $1B, city Economic Development Director Ayako Schuster said. 

Like many cities in the Metroplex, there are incentive agreements in place that limit the financial benefit Garland sees from two of those data centers. However, Stream Data Centers’ 275K SF hyperscale facility on 23 acres has no such deal in place, Schuster said. 

With a taxable value that has grown each year, Stream’s Garland data center facility now counts more than $611M worth of business personal property and was worth nearly $708M in 2024. That data center has generated more than $7.4M in revenue for the city of Garland over the last six years, hitting its peak of nearly $4.9M last year. 

The city's NTT Data facility has also generated more than $7M for the city over its nine-year life span. Construction is ongoing on the 410K SF Digital Realty data center in Garland, which has already produced more than $350K in revenue over the last two years.  

The financial impact from these data centers in the city needs to be reinvested to benefit the community as a whole, Schuster said. 

“We've been identifying [areas] all over our commercial district corridor and a lot of places we need to reinvest,” Schuster said.

Garland completed a redevelopment of its downtown square in 2023, and officials have further projects they would like to take on as revenue from the city's data centers grows.

“Digital Realty can potentially build four more similar-sized data centers on their property,” Schuster said. “That's really our vision, and I hope their vision also: to grow more.”

Mansfield’s partnership with Aligned is a step in the city’s plan to grow as a hub of innovation and create a collaborative community of industrial leaders, Mayor Michael Evans said.

Plus, he said, it’s “good business” for the city and the three counties Mansfield is part of.

“There's the possibility of this data center generating hundreds of millions of dollars into the financial construct [of] our city,” Evans said. “We believe that it's going to be a boon for us.”

Another thing Mansfield, Red Oak and Garland have in common is that they are each a little off the beaten path from Dallas-Fort Worth’s central business district and don’t have huge tax producers like some of the Metroplex’s bigger cities. 

“The tax implications of a data center is unlike any other real estate,” Bernet said. “That tax base gets funneled back into the markets with new streets and new schools and just beautification of a lot of these markets.”