Building the Future: Inside DataBank’s Red Oak Campus Construction

The future of Dallas data center infrastructure is taking shape 21 miles south of downtown. DataBank’s Red Oak campus is a 292-acre mega-development that will deliver eight data centers and 3.4 million gross square feet of capacity built specifically for the AI era.

Phase 1 will expand DataBank’s Dallas market presence to 12 data centers across the metro, with room on the campus for four additional buildings as demand grows. Construction is already underway, powered by a 400MW Oncor substation delivering up to 240MW of critical IT power in Phase 1 and scaling to 480MW at full buildout.

Each two-story building offers 425,000 gross square feet, including 200,000 square feet of data center space. Initial Ready for Service is targeted for Q2 2026.

What does it take to build 3.4 million square feet of AI-ready infrastructure? Our specific construction numbers tell the story.

By the Numbers: The Scale of Construction

The infrastructure going into the ground reveals just how massive this project is.

The electrical backbone:

• 19,008 power whips requiring over a million feet of Sealtite conduit (198 miles – enough to stretch from Austin to Dallas).
• The copper wire inside those whips totals 990 miles (enough to stretch from New York City to Jacksonville, Florida).

The fiber optic network:

• 1,760,000 feet of 864-count fiber optic cable (333 miles of high-density fiber).
• If you connected each individual strand end-to-end, the result would wrap around the Earth 11.5 times.

For more information, you can see the Red Oak campus in this video walkthrough.

“Projects like Red Oak don’t just happen because you have land and power available,” said Justin Puccio, executive vice president of corporate strategy. “The infrastructure complexity required to deliver 480 megawatts of AI-ready capacity is enormous. We’re talking about miles of copper, hundreds of miles of fiber, and construction coordination that has to be flawless. This is what it takes to meet the infrastructure demands the AI era is creating, and Dallas is exactly where this capacity needs to be.”

Growing the Dallas Footprint

Red Oak has become a major sub-market near Dallas, attracting some of the world’s largest cloud and technology providers. The new campus expands DataBank’s already substantial presence in the market, which includes its headquarters location (DFW1) and eight other data centers across the metro.

The Red Oak development is DataBank’s third major campus announcement in the past year, following acquisitions in Atlanta and Northern Virginia. When all three sites are fully developed, they’ll add more than 450 acres, 5.8 million square feet of data center space, and 792MW of power to DataBank’s portfolio.

The campus will leverage DataBank’s award-winning Universal Data Hall Design (UDHD), built to meet the demanding sustainability and performance requirements of enterprises, hyperscale cloud providers, and AI applications that need maximum power and cooling density.

Red Oak isn’t just big. It’s 990 miles of copper wire, 333 miles of fiber, and 198 miles of conduit big. That’s the kind of infrastructure the AI era demands.