CoStar News took an exclusive tour of DataBank’s DFW3 facility in Plano, Texas, with President, CFO, and incoming CEO Kevin Ooley as guide, offering readers a ground-level look at how a data center actually works — from the power room and catwalk to the Meet-Me-Room and equipment yard. The piece arrives at a moment of peak public curiosity and scrutiny about the industry.

Ooley walks CoStar through the facility’s closed-loop water system, its noise monitoring practices, and the buffered power infrastructure that protects client equipment from grid fluctuations. He also introduces the adjacent DFW8, a new three-story, 40.5-megawatt facility under construction in the same Plano complex, DataBank’s first multi-story data center and a sign of where the industry is heading as density requirements increase and land becomes more constrained.

“Our view is we’re working on mission-critical applications that every one of us, my family members and all of our employees need that are critical and crucial to society.”
— Kevin Ooley, President and CFO, DataBank

Co-founder Jerry Blair adds historical context, tracing DataBank’s origins in the former Federal Reserve Bank building in downtown Dallas in 2005 and the dramatic evolution of data center design since then, from basements with water leaks to precision-engineered, closed-loop facilities handling power densities ten times greater than they were 20 years ago.

The article also touches on DataBank’s Red Oak campus, now backed by more than $3.45 billion in construction financing, and Ooley’s call for a data center rating system that would help communities distinguish between high-quality, responsible operators and speculative developers who aren’t meeting the same standards.

Read the full article at CoStar News.