‘There’s a real technology revolution going on inside the industrial space,’ Hillwood’s Perot says
Georgia-based Southwire, a cable and wire company, is settling into its 1.2 million-square-foot distribution center in AllianceTexas as the company feeds off the boom in data center development.
Southwire Co. LLC has been operating in the building for about four months, said Rich Stinson, president and CEO. The facility is expected to eventually employ about 250 people.
Last year, Southwire leased the building at 14800 Blue Mound Road in Haslet. It’s part of the massive Alliance campus developed by Hillwood.
Stinson said his business — which he called the biggest wire and cable company in North America, with 2023 revenue of about $8 billion — decided to move into AllianceTexas because of its central location and a great relationship working with Hillwood.
“Fort Worth gets us to the Midwest, gets us to the West Coast, gets us all through Texas, so we can cover half the country from here,” Stinson said.
Stinson sees a big opportunity in data centers, which he said will make up 6% of all electricity used next year. DFW is a major data center hub in its own right, accounting for about one-tenth of the primary U.S. data center market. He also cited the transition to 5G and new, high-tech factories in the U.S. as good business opportunities.
Southwire employs 9,500 people total. Stinson said the company invested $1.6 billion over the last four years and plans to invest $4.6 billion more, not including acquisitions, over the years few years. He said another DFW location for Southwire could land in Denton, where the company has another facility and owns more land, but nothing is final.
“So a very real scenario will be that we do build stuff right next to our other plant, and we’ll have sister plants,” Stinson said. “I mean, that is probably going to happen, but I’m not going to commit to that.”
Hillwood has gotten very good at catering to the evolving needs of industrial tenants. The high ceilings of Southwire’s new building are indicative of companies wanting higher inventory systems, which are increasingly being operated by robots and drones.
Ross Perot Jr., founder and chairman of Hillwood, said proximity to the BNSF Alliance Intermodal facility is also important for companies such as Southwire. He said Hillwood is going to implement autonomous trucking from the rail yards to the new building and construct a private bridge for the vehicles so they don’t have to use public roads.
“There’s a real technology revolution going on inside the industrial space that most people, if you’re not in the business, you don’t comprehend,” he said.
Despite a slower industrial market, Hillwood is continuing to construct large buildings, and announced in May a 3.5 million-square-foot space called Alliance Westport 14. Perot said there are a lot of buildings under construction that are almost leased and another wave of development is ahead. He said he was just about to approve the next million-square-foot speculative building.
Perot said AllianceTexas, with around 30 million square feet of inventory, is half developed. Currently, more than 560 firms are based there and about 70,000 people each day work in Alliance.
“We build to demand,” Perot said. “If our clients want buildings, they’re going to get buildings and even if the [interest] rates are higher, we will get a building through the system.”
