New Hillwood Venture Kicks Off with 'Byte' from Alliance for 1.1-Mil SF Cyberspace Complex

DALLAS-Hillwood is launching a new entity, Teraspace Networks, to provide bricks for Internet clicks in the Dallas-Ft. Worth region while making plans to build more “from the ground up” data centers in Austin, Phoenix, Houston and Denver.

Teraspace Networks has been on the drawing boards for some time, marked by a hushed construction project at Ft. Worth’s Alliance Gateway. As it turns out, the construction is the first phase of a 1.1-million sf Internet data center complex, just the first of several being planned by the new Hillwood division. Heading up the operation is James Trout, a former vice president and corporate facilities officer for ProLogis Trust.

Construction is expected to wrap up in March 2001 on the Alliance Gateway Internet Data Center as dirt begins flying on a 24-acre tract in Richardson’s Telecom Corridor and 21-acre parcel on the south side of the Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport, Trout told GlobeSt.com. Each site will contain a 200,000-sf data center. Contracts are pending on the land acquisitions.

There is no intent to compete with Alliance businesses for web hosting or carrier services. “We’re just the guys providing the power, the building and the connectivity,” he emphasized to GlobeSt.com.

The flagship project at Alliance consists of dual two-story buildings totaling 300,000 sf. Hillwood is dedicating 41 acres to the high-tech bricks provider for the Alliance development, which is being tailored to multi-tenant use. Trout says Teraspace has 25 prospects lined up for the structures, with one signed letter of intent in hand.

The Alliance complex has been chosen to anchor Teraspace’s IT inroad because of its abundance of power and readily available land. Half of each building will house large servers while 30% has been dedicated for office space and the balance for support services.

“Clearly, it will be a magnet for additional users,” Trout says of the undertaking. He says negotiations are under way from “San Jose to Washington, D.C.” to lure high-tech companies to the Teraspace projects.

Trout says it’s more cost efficient to build carrier hotels “from the ground up” plus the approach plays off companies’ desires to maintain corporate identities. The center’s size makes it feasible for a tenant to rent all or a significant portion of the building, unlike the rehabbed high-rises in downtown CBDs. The Alliance buildings will have the clear height, floor plan layouts and structural capacity that aren’t necessarily in rehabbed structures without costly investments.

Teraspace will establish several strategic locations in a market so data center tenants will be able to accelerate market penetration schedules. The Dallas-Fort Worth data center facilities will be interconnected via a fiber optic metropolitan-area network, just like those found in CBDs.

Teraspace’s Alliance center takes the 9,600 development “to the next level” by offering more top-of-the-line carrier choice, high-speed connections and redundant service, says Mike Berry, president of Hillwood Properties. Alliance’s carrier roster already includes AT&T, Broadwing, Cable & Wireless, Enron, Genuity, Level 3, Nextlink, One Source/Millenium, Qwest, Savvis, Southwestern Bell, Sprint and Worldcom.