‘There’s a real technology revolution going on inside the industrial space,’ Hillwood’s Perot says

Georgia-based Southwire, a cable and wire company, is settling into its 1.2 million-square-foot distribution center in AllianceTexas as the company feeds off the boom in data center development.

Southwire Co. LLC has been operating in the building for about four months, said Rich Stinson, president and CEO. The facility is expected to eventually employ about 250 people.

Last year, Southwire leased the building at 14800 Blue Mound Road in Haslet. It’s part of the massive Alliance campus developed by Hillwood.

Stinson said his business — which he called the biggest wire and cable company in North America, with 2023 revenue of about $8 billion — decided to move into AllianceTexas because of its central location and a great relationship working with Hillwood.

“Fort Worth gets us to the Midwest, gets us to the West Coast, gets us all through Texas, so we can cover half the country from here,” Stinson said.

Stinson sees a big opportunity in data centers, which he said will make up 6% of all electricity used next year. DFW is a major data center hub in its own right, accounting for about one-tenth of the primary U.S. data center market. He also cited the transition to 5G and new, high-tech factories in the U.S. as good business opportunities.

Southwire employs 9,500 people total. Stinson said the company invested $1.6 billion over the last four years and plans to invest $4.6 billion more, not including acquisitions, over the years few years. He said another DFW location for Southwire could land in Denton, where the company has another facility and owns more land, but nothing is final.

“So a very real scenario will be that we do build stuff right next to our other plant, and we’ll have sister plants,” Stinson said. “I mean, that is probably going to happen, but I’m not going to commit to that.”

Hillwood has gotten very good at catering to the evolving needs of industrial tenants. The high ceilings of Southwire’s new building are indicative of companies wanting higher inventory systems, which are increasingly being operated by robots and drones.

Ross Perot Jr., founder and chairman of Hillwood, said proximity to the BNSF Alliance Intermodal facility is also important for companies such as Southwire. He said Hillwood is going to implement autonomous trucking from the rail yards to the new building and construct a private bridge for the vehicles so they don’t have to use public roads.

“There’s a real technology revolution going on inside the industrial space that most people, if you’re not in the business, you don’t comprehend,” he said.

Despite a slower industrial market, Hillwood is continuing to construct large buildings, and announced in May a 3.5 million-square-foot space called Alliance Westport 14. Perot said there are a lot of buildings under construction that are almost leased and another wave of development is ahead. He said he was just about to approve the next million-square-foot speculative building.

Perot said AllianceTexas, with around 30 million square feet of inventory, is half developed. Currently, more than 560 firms are based there and about 70,000 people each day work in Alliance.

“We build to demand,” Perot said. “If our clients want buildings, they’re going to get buildings and even if the [interest] rates are higher, we will get a building through the system.”

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Wing and Zipline have partnered with Walmart to offer drone deliveries for “up to 75%” of DFW residents, along with providing services for other area businesses. Now the two innovators have received the first-ever FAA approval to operate drones beyond line of sight in the same shared airspace using new UAS traffic management technology (UTM).

Marking a first in U.S. aviation history, the Federal Aviation Administration has authorized Wing Aviation and Zipline International to fly commercial drones in the same Dallas-area airspace without visual observers. 

In typical operations, a drone pilot must be able to see the aircraft at all times, the FAA said in a blog posted on Medium. But beginning in early 2023, Wing and Zipline began testing a new system called UAS traffic management technology, or UTM (UAS is short for unmanned aircraft systems.) The testing was initially done via simulations.

UTM leverages new advancements in air traffic technology and procedures that the FAA says could one day make Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) flights “routine.”

The FAA authorizations will allow Wing and Zipline to deliver packages in the Dallas area while keeping their drones safely separated using the UTM system—managing the airspace themselves with “rigorous FAA safety oversight.”

“This is the first time the FAA has recognized a third-party to safely manage drone-to-drone interactions,” Praveen Raju, a program manager in the FAA’s NextGen Office, said in the blog post. “As always, safety comes first, and we required exhaustive research and testing before giving the green light.”

Dallas Innovates has been following the rise of drone deliveries in North Texas for years.

A lot of initial testing happened at Hillwood’s AllianceTexas Flight Test Center in Fort Worth in what’s known as the Mobility Innovation Zone (The MIZ), where advanced testing continues to this day.

In October 2021, Wing Aviation—Alphabet’s drone delivery sister company—launched a first-of-its-kind commercial drone service in a major U.S. metro out of Frisco Station north of Dallas. That same month, Wing began making on-demand deliveries from Walgreens drug stores in Little Elm and Frisco.

In March 2022, Israel-based Flytrex began delivering chicken wings by drone from a Chili’s restaurant in Granbury in a partnership with Dallas-based Brinker International. In flights that averaged 3 minutes 30 seconds, wings zoom over Lake Granbury, pause above their destination, and are lowered to the ground in a bright yellow bag, while the drone hovers 80 feet above.

In December 2022, Walmart began drone deliveries from 11 Dallas-area stores via a partnership with the company DroneUp. The drone hubs included Dallas, Garland, Mesquite, Murphy, Plano, Richardson, Rowlett, and The Colony.

In August 2023, Walmart said it was partnering with Wing to expand its drone delivery service in Dallas-Fort Worth by adding services to two area superstores.

In October 2023, Ireland-based Manna Drone Delivery kicked off its U.S. commercial operations from The Miz in Fort Worth, with drones that fly at 60 miles per hour at a height of around 200 feet. The first deliveries were food, beverages, and Halloween candy to residents of Hillwood’s Pecan Square development at the north end of the AllianceTexas MIZ.

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