Campus Spotlight: Inside SDC Austin

Featuring insights from Mark Noonan, SVP of Revenue – East at Sabey Data Centers, on the market drivers, design strategy, and operational characteristics behind SDC Austin.

As data center demand expands beyond legacy hubs, additional markets are supporting the development of digital infrastructure. One example is Austin, Texas, where population growth, a large technology presence, and access to power have contributed to increased data center activity.

The SDC Austin data center campus is being developed by Sabey Data Centers, a fully integrated data center platform jointly owned and governed by Sabey Corporation and National Real Estate Advisors, which acts as the discretionary investment manager on behalf of its institutional clients. The campus is designed to support enterprise, hyperscale, and high-performance computing workloads within a growing technology corridor. To provide an inside look at the campus, its design, and the market forces shaping its development, we spoke with Mark Noonan, SVP of Revenue – East at Sabey Data Centers. “Most people in Texas know that Austin’s kind of considered the tech hub of the South,” says Mark Noonan.

Austin has become a growing market for data center development, supported by several structural factors, including:

• Proximity to a large and expanding technology ecosystem
• Access to enterprise and cloud users operating in the region
• Availability of power relative to more established data center markets
• A lower incidence of certain natural disaster risks compared to other regions

The region’s established footprint of major technology employers — Dell, Samsung, and Oracle’s headquarters among them — reinforced the case. “There’s just a lot of technology in this area,” Noonan says. “So given that’s a pretty big demographic within our client base, I think it made a lot of sense to be here.” Together, these characteristics have contributed to the region’s use for large-scale computing deployments.

SDC Austin was developed as a purpose-built campus on 40 acres in Round Rock, just north of Austin, and is designed to have two buildings at full build-out. Key design features include:

• Up to 84 megawatts (MW) of total campus power capacity at full build-out
• High-density environments designed to accommodate advanced compute workloads
• Flexible configurations that can support both traditional and emerging use cases
• Modular design enabling phased deployment and scalability over time

That flexibility was a deliberate design choice. “The internal team, the architecture team, and engineering team at Sabey put a lot of flexibility within the design when they built this building,” Noonan explains. The campus is also configured to support liquid cooling through a closed-loop, air-cooled system: air chillers on the roof handle the heat exchange, feeding a large 10- to 12-inch diameter cooling loop filled with water that stays sealed and closed throughout the process — reflecting the increasing importance of infrastructure designed for high-density computing applications.

SDC Austin is designed with features commonly required for large-scale data center deployments, including:

• High-density capability: Designed to support deployments that may require higher power per rack, including configurations up to 217 kW per cabinet
• Integrated delivery model: Sabey’s in-house approach to design, construction, and operations provides continuity across development and operations
• Connectivity flexibility: Carrier-neutral infrastructure allows for multiple network options
• Security and reliability: Multi-layer security protocols and redundant systems support continuous operations

That high-density capability is already in use. “We have clients that are using liquid cooling for 100 kilowatt racks, 150 kilowatt racks, and up to 217 kilowatt racks,” Noonan notes. “They’re enabled by that cooling loop to do the liquid cooling the way that it’s designed to be done.” These characteristics support a range of tenant needs across enterprise, cloud, and specialized computing environments.

SDC Austin brings purpose-built capacity into a growth-oriented market that sits outside the legacy data center hubs. The campus is designed to:

• Serve the Austin technology corridor from a single 40-acre site
• Support a range of tenant types and workload requirements
• Serve both existing and emerging demand drivers within digital infrastructure

As digital infrastructure requirements continue to evolve, markets like Austin may play an increasing role in supporting future demand. At the same time, development in these markets is influenced by factors such as power availability, infrastructure timelines, and competition for capacity.

SDC Austin illustrates how a purpose-built campus can adapt to an evolving range of computing needs through scale, flexibility, and design choices made up front.

To learn more about our data center portfolio and to read additional insights, click here.