A data center shortlist by Thursday
The council wants a shortlist of data center sites in Dallas in three days. Parcels, zoning and power feeds used to be a week of GIS. Here it is one question.
Axi's brief was three criteria and a deadline. Sam typed it almost word for word, and NeuraCities turned it into a shortlist in the time it takes to read this post.
How it got to four sites
Everything on the map came from public sources, pulled live for Dallas:
- Dallas's own tax parcel file and its base zoning districts, straight from the city's open data portal.
- For power, the EPA's ECHO facility register filtered to Toxics Release Inventory sites, which is where generating stations and other large industrial facilities are recorded. That is the Power Plants (TRI Facilities) layer, 1,000 points across the metro.
- Then one analysis: keep parcels over five acres, keep zoning districts that are industrial or commercial, and find the parcels within five kilometres of a facility. Four parcels met all three tests, and the table beside the map lists them by owner, class and sector.
Where to take it
The shortlist is a starting point, not the end of due diligence. The obvious next layers are the utility's substations and fiber routes, and both are a follow-up question in the same conversation: add the file, ask it to rerun the last step, and the four either hold up or get replaced.
Dallas Data Center Siting
Everything above is this conversation. Open it to see the sources, steps and layers, and ask the next question yourself.