Developers who are buying an old hotel northwest of downtown Dallas plan to replace the building with a huge high-tech facility.
Lincoln Property Co. and T5 DataCenters plan to build the 6-story data center complex on the site of the Cabana Motor Hotel on Stemmons Freeway.
Dallas County is selling the 52-year-old hotel – recently used as a detention center – to Lincoln Property.
Lincoln Rackhouse, the data center subsidiary of the Dallas-based real estate developer, is already hunting business for the more than 300,000-square-foot data center it plans to build on the site at 899 N. Stemmons.
Lincoln Rackhouse Martin Peck said that his firm is ready to start work on the project as soon as the purchase of the property is complete.
"We're just waiting on the county which has some things they need to do first," Peck said.
The planned data center would be one of the largest in the downtown Dallas area and would handle a growing need for Internet, telecommunications and data transfer traffic.
Peck said his firm chose the Stemmons Freeway site because of its access to power and telecom infrastructure. "It's because of the power substation right next door and the fiber running all along Stemmons," he said.
An electric power station is located north side of the data center site.
T5 and Lincoln plan to have the building open in early 2017, according to marketing materials for the project.
The Stemmons Freeway data center is just the latest in a string of such big projects in the works in North Texas.
Facebook last month broke ground North of Fort Worth on what could ultimately be a $1 billion data center near Alliance Airport.
And the owners of the huge Infomart building just north of downtown Dallas are a spending more than $40 million to upgrade the landmark building for more data center tenants.
Dallas County earlier this year agreed to sell the 3.3-acre hotel property on Stemmons Freeway to Lincoln Property for $8.7 million.
Currently called the Bill Decker Detention Center, the building is used by the county for a work release facility.
The building was once one of Dallas' poshest hotels, built by the same developer who did Caesars Palace and Circus Circus in Las Vegas.