There’s roughly 20 data centers in Dallas. As of today, there’s 3 data centers that we have identified in Fort Worth. So what are the reason’s for this huge disparity?

For starters, the city of Fort Worth is not enticing data centers to come to the city. The city wants to improve air quality and data centers are huge offenders with the amount of power they consume. In a Fort Worth Chamber of commerce meeting in 2005, we heard that the chamber had voted against offering tax incentives to entice some prospective companies from bringing their data centers to Fort Worth. There were some high dollar data centers in Fort Worth from the late 1990s that went under when the dot com bubble burst. Those buildings were taken over by the city and surprisingly converted into storage and office areas. This meant millions of dollars of infrastructure was ripped out and thrown away.

Another reason for the lack of data centers in Fort Worth is the lack of demand for technology related companies in Fort Worth. There’s only a handful of web designers in the city which is generally a pretty good pulse of the technology market for a city.

In the opinion of InDallas.net founder Rocky Ahmann, Fort Worth is a prime location for a data center for the following reasons. Geographically downtown Fort Worth is 32 miles away from downtown Dallas. Sarbanes Oxley dictates that publicly held companies’s back up facilities have to be 30 miles away from their primary facilities. That would make Fort Worth a prime destination for a back up facility for all of those Dallas data centers where you could have one administrator be able to manage both facilities. In addition, there’s a long standing unspoken rivalry between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is suprising that all of those Fort Worth oil companies are sending their data center dollars east on Interstate 30. Plus that means that their administrators, assuming that they are in Fort Worth, are a 30 minute drive time away from their servers in the event of an emergency.

In addition, downtown Fort Worth has the fiber and power infrastructure in place to support a successful data center. Don’t be surprised if the new data center in Fort Worth is sold out by this time next year.