As president of Hillwood, Mike Berry oversees the 27,000-acre development known as AllianceTexas in far north Fort Worth. He said his job has changed vastly since he started working with the company and its founder, Ross Perot Jr., in July 1988. For starters, back then no one knew who they were or what they were trying to do.
“Mr. Perot’s name was obviously a well-known name in U.S. business circles, but really, no one knew of our organization, at least in the role that we were trying to establish our brand and our identity, and more importantly, we were building a project that had never been built before,” Berry said.
That project became Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, the world’s first industrial airport, which opened in 1989 and was designed specifically for cargo and corporate aviation. The public-private partnership between Hillwood, the Federal Aviation Administration and the City of Fort Worth has totaled $16.3 billion in investment, with $15.2 billion from the private sector and $1.1 billion from the public sector, according to a new report from the Texas comptroller.
Alliance generated $10.21 billion last year in economic impact and $130 billion since 1990, according to a report from Hillwood. The area is a major inland port, home to the airport as well as BNSF’s Alliance Intermodal Facility, and accounted for $834.6 million in trade in Texas in 2024. Major companies that have invested there range from Amazon Air to FedEx, along with Target, Henry Schein and Topgolf Callaway.
Berry’s work was recognized by the North Texas Commission in September, when he received the organization’s top honor: the Dan Petty Regional Visionary Award. The award recognizes leaders who have contributed significantly to the economic vitality of North Texas.
While Berry still says his work revolves around building relationships and sharing the potential of Alliance, he is also focused on the future of the region as a whole. Dallas Business Journal spoke with Berry to talk about his priorities and what’s next for AllianceTexas. This conversation has been edited lightly for grammar, length and clarity.
DBJ: How has your job overseeing Alliance changed over the decades?
Berry: When I started … no one really knew who we were. Mr. Perot’s name was obviously a well-known name in U.S. business circles, but really, no one knew of our organization, at least in the role that we were trying to establish our brand and our identity, and more importantly, we were building a project that had never been built before: an industrial airport. There had never been one like it built, and certainly not one built led by the private sector. … Really my job was spent for at least the first decade … just establishing relationships, telling the story and the capabilities of North Texas and Alliance to companies in all different sectors: aviation, aerospace, logistics and transportation.
Over the years we were able to, fortunately, win some big projects and bring in a variety of big companies. And that sort of set the stage for us to grow up to the present. Now my job is more about strategy and growth. How do we build? How do we future-proof not just Alliance but really the whole North Texas area? How do we continue to build infrastructure? How do we continue to maintain a competitive housing affordability, supply? How do we address energy long term? How do we address roads and mobility? How do we address education and workforce development? Because all of those things play a huge role in in our development of 27,000 acres. We can’t continue to be successful if the region’s not leading and successful.
One of the big announcements made last year was a $262 million project to advance logistics in Alliance. What is the next milestone for the Smart Port initiative?
We accomplished two milestones. We received an $80 million Smart Port grant from the federal government, which we’re now moving forward in implementing, which will allow basically connector lanes to be built directly from the intermodal center out to I-35 and State Highway 170, which will free up the flow of of goods. Then the other thing, which was just approved by the commissioners at the Texas Department of Transportation, is an agreement on a lease to allow us to build a private bridge from the intermodal hub over Highway 156 and tie it into our Westport development, which opens up direct access to all that freight into an area where we can build about 15 million square feet of future industrial space. Neither of them are under construction. We’ve still got a few things to do, but we’ve gotten all the approvals.
I’m curious if there are any new industries that you’re targeting?
So the project that we announced recently with Wistron and Nvidia, that is an advanced manufacturing project where actually Wistron, who’s the contract manufacturer for Nvidia, will be building the servers, supercomputers with the Nvidia AI chips that go in them that will basically run a lot of these new data centers that are being built. With that project, we’re now also seeing other related suppliers, other related manufacturers coming in as a result of that announcement. So I think we’re going to see more advanced manufacturing activity happen that we really haven’t seen before focused in on that tech and supercomputer manufacturing sector.
The other one that we really never anticipated is the movie studio activity. We just completed building out 450,000 square feet of sound stages inside two of our spec buildings at Alliance. So we basically took our standard spec industrial business and converted it into sound stages, and they’re already full, and we just finished them literally. So [four] of the Paramount Taylor Sheridan shows … are being filmed there. We’re now looking at, how do we grow? How do we expand? Where can we build more of a full campus that would include not just the sound stages, but then also all the post-production support that needs to be around these sound stages? So that’s a whole industry sector that we think there’s real growth around that.
With what’s happening, both with the film incentives that were passed by the legislature this summer and with the workforce development training programs that are in place, I think you’re going to see a lot of growth, not just at Alliance, but I think the whole state is going to begin to see a lot of projects spring up around the production industry.
Then lastly, mobility innovation. We created a few years ago a Mobility Innovation Zone at Alliance to attract a lot of the freight mobility leaders who are doing autonomous trucking and freight movement with autonomy both both surface and air, drones and trucks. And we just announced recently a new company [Torc Robotics] located here at Alliance. They have an autonomous truck that actually is running on the roads today, but they are one of several of the autonomous companies that are starting to locate here. So I think there’s a real opportunity for us to grow that sector as well.
How are you navigating tariffs when it comes to whether to build the next big industrial space?
They’re cutting both ways. In certain industries they are causing people to pause. But the tariff issue is causing some companies, particularly offshore or foreign-owned companies, to accelerate manufacturing activity in the U.S. Wistron is Taiwanese. We’re seeing interest from more Taiwanese companies. We’re seeing Korean companies. We’re seeing activity out of Europe, some European manufacturing companies.
In certain cases, the tariff impact is actually accelerating capital investment, particularly by foreign-owned manufacturers in the U.S., and that’s why we are continuing to build spec in this environment, because we think there is a wave of activity that actually will accelerate because of the tariffs.
Are tariffs raising construction costs for you? And are these companies that are trying to move forward, are they willing to pay new prices?
When the tariffs started to first roll out, we did a big analysis internally about how we would be impacted. Our big materials [are] steel, concrete and lumber. And for the most part, we source our big materials domestically. So to date, we haven’t been greatly impacted by the tariffs on our big shell construction costs. Where the tariffs are impacting are on certain finish-out items. One is lighting fixtures, specialty finishes, things like that that you’re having to buy overseas. But as a percentage … of total cost, we’re not seeing huge impact from the tariffs.
Most of our big costs, we’re able to source it domestically. And hopefully that continues. There’s a little bit of a dip in construction right now, at least in North Texas, in both industrial and multifamily. Those are two of our largest product lines. So I think we might be … helped a little bit by that little bit of softening in the market.
