The Dallas Morning News sat down with DataBank CEO Raul Martynek for an exclusive follow-up interview, revisiting a conversation from nearly a year ago in which he predicted Dallas-Fort Worth would surpass Northern Virginia as the nation’s top data center market. His verdict: if anything, things have accelerated.

Martynek addresses the year’s biggest shift head-on: the surge in public awareness and political attention around data centers. Community opposition has bled into elections, moratoriums have spread from New York to Texas to Pennsylvania, and speculation has flooded interconnection queues with projects that have no real capital behind them. He draws a sharp distinction between DataBank’s 20-year track record serving Fortune 1000 companies in healthcare, banking, and manufacturing, and the speculative entrants chasing land plays.

“DataBank has an existing business that’s been around for 20 years. We have (more than) 2,000 customers. These are Fortune 1000 companies that run banking systems and hospitals. This is not AI. This is mission critical healthcare services. We have banks, manufacturers, financial firms, drug companies. This is the digital underpinning of our modern economy.”
— Raul Martynek, CEO, DataBank

On water, closed-loop cooling systems have effectively addressed the industry’s most persistent environmental criticism. On energy, Martynek welcomes common sense regulation as a necessary step toward clarity, arguing that the current absence of rules — not the rules themselves — is what’s creating uncertainty. He also outlines three concrete changes DataBank has made in response to the new environment: extending project timelines out to 2032, building a dedicated public affairs function, and investing more deeply in community engagement ahead of 2027.

Martynek closes with a five-year outlook grounded in historical parallel. Just as the internet quietly transformed daily life between 2000 and 2005 — enabling ecommerce, video, banking, and communication that seemed unimaginable at the start — he expects AI to do the same. The infrastructure being built today, he says, will underpin a way of life most people can’t yet picture.

Read the full interview at The Dallas Morning News.