Data at data centers doesn’t just sit there. It’s constantly on the move, as companies and their customers upload and access data stored at hyperscale campuses across the U.S. You can think of that data almost like airline traffic flowing between the East Coast and West Coast, with vital “hubs” and “destinations” increasingly sited at locations in Texas.

To serve those data centers in the Texas Triangle—also known as the DASH region, for Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston—”mesh routes” are a key ingredient in enhancing speed, reliability, and keeping traffic flowing with interconnectedness and redundancy.

Today, Stockholm, Sweden-based Arelion. a global internet services company, announced it has launched three new, “fully diverse” mesh routes in Texas. The routes form a new ring from Austin to Dallas, to Houston, and back to Austin, with additional overbuild capacity between Austin, San Antonio and El Paso, Arelion said.

“We’re seeing significant demand for services at scale in Texas to support the data flows of growing AI/ML and cloud applications in the region,” Art Kazmierczak, Arelion’s director of strategic sales and network development, said in a statement. “This network expansion empowers enterprises with improved connectivity and reliable access to AI/ML resources in these booming markets. Our new routes will also provide additional diversity and capacity to Mexico, helping spur economic growth and technological innovation in one of our primary investment regions.”

The network expansion will enable Arelion’s wholesale and enterprise customers to bypass traditional “carrier hotels” and connect directly to hyperscale campuses, the company said. The goal: “enhancing availability and reducing latency for AI/ML and cloud interconnection.”

North Texas is nation’s 2nd-largest data center market

North Texas is the United States’ second-largest data center market by inventory, Arelion noted, with only.  Virginia surpassing it. Importantly, North Texas serves as a primary hub for the nation’s East-West and North-South traffic flows.

The trend has been soaring for years. In Q4 2021, the Dallas-Fort Worth data center market recorded the most active quarter of leasing of all time, CBRE reported in January 2022. In the years since, Dallas Innovates has reported frequently on big projects in the region—from a $1.6 billion CoreWeave data center in Plano to DataBank’s 480MW data center campus on 292 acres of land in Red Oak to a 768-acre hyperscale data center campus outside Grand Prairie developed by Dallas-based Provident Data Centers and McLean, Virginia-based PowerHouse Data Centers, and many more.

All that building has led to eyebrow-raising growth. North Texas saw a 173% increase in dedicated data center power in the second half of 2023 alone, Arelion notes, partly thanks to Texas’ “comparatively lower power costs.”

Austin and San Antonio’s data center markets are also growing “exponentially,” the company added, thanks to mounting demand from hyperscale cloud and AI/ML providers. Those markets’ combined data center construction activity have quadrupled to 463.5 megawatts since 2023.

With its latest network expansion, Arelion says it now has seven “diverse routes” out of the Dallas metro area and six diverse routes out of the Austin metro area—providing its customers “enhanced access to its #1 ranked global Internet backbone, as well as its portfolio of reliable, fully diverse connectivity services.”

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