Built for the Boom: How GST Supports Data Center Construction in North Texas and Beyond

The numbers around DFW's data center market are hard to overstate. The region is the second-largest data center market in North America, trailing only Northern Virginia. Since 2020, local supply has grown by 200% — from 710 MW to over 1,600 MW of capacity. Net absorption in the first half of 2025 alone hit 575 MW. Projects under construction are running 80% preleased before they open. Vacancy across the market sits at roughly 2.4%.

By year-end 2026, according to CBRE, the DFW market is on track to double in size from where it stood just two years ago.

For anyone outside the region, that might read as a sudden explosion. From where we sit in Fort Worth, it isn't. North Texas has been a technology and telecommunications hub for decades — the kind of place that attracted corporate headquarters, financial services infrastructure, and telecom buildouts long before the term "hyperscaler" existed. The data center boom is the latest chapter in a story this region has been writing for a long time. The specs have changed. The scale has changed. The fundamental demand for reliable, high-quality fabricated infrastructure hasn't.

Why DFW Keeps Winning

Part of what drives the market here is geography — DFW's central location, fiber density, and business-friendly cost structure have attracted cloud providers, AI infrastructure companies, and financial institutions for decades. Part of it is power: Oncor's ability to deliver grid connections in roughly 18 months, compared to three or more years in markets like Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley, gives North Texas a structural timing advantage that matters enormously when build schedules are measured in months, not years.

All of that growth has to be built. And building it requires steel — a lot of it, from suppliers who already know this market.

What a Data Center Actually Needs From a Fabricator

The headline components of a data center — servers, cooling systems, power distribution — get most of the attention. What doesn't get talked about is the fabricated metal that makes the whole facility function: the structural framework that holds it together, the miscellaneous steel that fills in everything in between, and the rack infrastructure that houses the equipment itself.

At GST, our work in data centers falls across all of it.

Rack fabrication is a precision job. Welded steel frames have to hold significant equipment loads, stay true under vibration, and hit dimensional tolerances tightly enough that OEM hardware mounts without shimming or field modification. At the volumes data center builds require — sometimes hundreds of identical units for a single facility — that means consistent, repeatable production from a shop that treats every run with the same standard.

The miscellaneous steel scope on a large data center is substantial and often underestimated at bid time. Stair stringers and railings throughout multi-story mechanical spaces. Cable tray support structures running the length of data halls. Equipment plinths and dunnage for generators, UPS units, and cooling skids. Wall-mounted brackets, door frames, access platform guardrails, embed plates, angle iron — the entire category of components that aren't glamorous enough to make a spec sheet headline but have to be right for everything else to work. This is work GST has been doing across commercial and industrial construction in North Texas for over ninety years. Data centers are the newest application, not a new discipline.

The Timeline Reality

Data center construction runs on some of the most compressed schedules in the industry. Liquidated damages clauses are standard. Every trade's start date depends on the trade before it finishing on time. A fabrication delay on a stair package or a rack order doesn't just slow that one item — it ripples forward through every downstream contractor waiting for their access window.

General contractors building data centers in DFW are actively looking for regional fabricators who can execute at speed without creating coordination overhead. The calculus is straightforward: a local shop with available capacity and a track record of on-time delivery is worth more to a compressed-schedule job than a distant supplier with a lower unit price and a four-week lead time on changes.

GST is in Fort Worth. The projects are here. We've been supplying this region's construction and technology infrastructure for a long time, and we're not learning the ropes on someone's critical-path schedule.

A Market That Isn't Slowing Down

The DFW pipeline as of mid-2025 showed over 1,000 MW under construction and nearly 3,900 MW in planned development. Even accounting for the power and grid constraints that have pushed some delivery dates into 2027 and beyond, the volume of active work in this region is unprecedented. And DFW is one market among many — Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, and Columbus are all running similar build cycles simultaneously.

For a fabrication shop positioned to support this work, the question isn't whether the demand exists. It's whether you're already in the supply chain when the next project breaks ground.

We are. If your next data center project needs a fabrication partner in North Texas — for rack work, miscellaneous steel, structural components, or powder-coated finish work — we'd welcome the conversation.

GST Manufacturing is a Fort Worth-based metal fabrication company serving data center construction, rail and transit, construction, energy, retail, and cinema industries since 1933. Contact us to discuss your next project.