Why Alliance Keeps Landing DFW's Biggest Industrial Deals, and What It Means for Everyone Else

Drive up I-35W north of downtown Fort Worth and the exits start advertising it before you ever see a building: Alliance Gateway, Championship Parkway, Golden Triangle. This is AllianceTexas, the 27,000-acre master-planned development that Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood began building in the late 1980s on land most people assumed was too far from anything to matter. Three decades later, more than 600 companies operate inside its boundaries and the submarket supports something like 73,000 jobs, according to figures Hillwood released covering 2025. If you've toured industrial space anywhere in north Tarrant or Denton County, you've felt the gravity of this place even if nobody pointed it out by name.

The numbers behind that gravity are worth sitting with for a second. Private and public investment in AllianceTexas topped 18.3 billion dollars in 2025 alone, split between roughly 16.7 billion from private developers and tenants and about 1.6 billion in public infrastructure, roads, schools, and public safety spending across the nine municipalities the development spans. Since 1990, the area has generated 4.6 billion dollars in property taxes for local cities and school districts. That's not incremental growth. That's a submarket that has reshaped the tax base of an entire corner of North Texas.

What draws tenants here isn't only land availability, though Hillwood still controls enough of it to keep building at a pace most developers can't match. It's the connectivity stacked on top of that land. Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport sits inside the development for air cargo. Interstate 35W runs straight through it. And anchoring the whole logistics case is BNSF's Alliance Intermodal Facility, a 500-plus acre rail yard that opened in 1994 as a purpose-built intermodal hub rather than a converted older yard. The facility handles more than a million container lifts a year, averaging around 2,700 a day with peak days pushing close to 3,900, and sends 50 to 60 outbound trains a week to the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Houston, plus Chicago, Denver, and destinations tied to Mexico trade under USMCA. For a tenant whose freight moves by rail, or who's thinking about it, there's no comparable setup anywhere else in DFW.

That intermodal advantage just got a significant upgrade. In November 2025, Hillwood, BNSF, and the City of Fort Worth launched the Alliance Logistics District, an almost 1,400-acre zone built around the rail facility that's designed to support autonomous vehicle operations, CDL-free hostler moves within the yard, and heavy-haul freight over 80,000 pounds. A new 20 million dollar bridge over FM-156 tied to the project is expected to finish in late 2026. It's an early bet on where freight operations are heading, and it puts Alliance ahead of most of the country on infrastructure built specifically for automation rather than retrofitted for it later.

The tenant roster reflects how far the submarket has moved beyond pure e-commerce fulfillment. Recent additions and expansions include Wistron, the electronics manufacturer, MP Materials, which processes rare earth materials tied to defense and tech supply chains, and Embraer, the aerospace manufacturer. Add SGS Studios into the mix and you've got a submarket pulling in advanced manufacturing and specialized production alongside the big-box distribution tenants that built its reputation in the first place. That diversification matters if you're worried about overexposure to a single sector's boom-and-bust cycle.

On the construction side, Hillwood isn't slowing down. The company broke ground in June 2026 on Alliance Westport 16, a speculative building north of 1.2 million square feet with 40-foot clear height, 620-foot depth, and 60-foot loading bays, the kind of spec that only makes sense for a handful of e-commerce and heavy logistics users. It's built with 3,000 amps of power and room to expand to a tri-load configuration, 190-foot truck courts, and 276 trailer parking spaces expandable to 504. It connects directly to the BNSF intermodal yard via a private bridge and is explicitly designed with autonomous vehicle operations in mind. Completion is targeted for July 2027, and as of now it's fully speculative, with no tenant attached. That's one building. AllianceTexas as a whole has delivered north of 60 million square feet of speculative industrial space over its history, and Hillwood has four more projects totaling 3.2 million square feet planned within Fort Worth city limits alone.

Here's what all of this means if you're a tenant sizing up Alliance for your own operation. Incentives are real and worth pursuing. Denton County offers Triple Freeport Inventory Tax Exemptions in parts of the development, and Foreign Trade Zone status is available with direct access to U.S. Customs services, both of which matter a lot if you're carrying import-heavy inventory. The size and spec of what's being built also skews toward large-block users. If your requirement is 50,000 or 75,000 square feet, you're not the target tenant for buildings like Alliance Westport 16, and you'll want to look at the submarket's smaller, earlier-generation product instead of assuming everything here is a million-square-foot box.

There's a piece of this smaller and mid-size tenants sometimes miss, too. Being adjacent to this ecosystem still has value even if you're not leasing space with a rail spur of your own. A distribution operation running trucks in and out of Alliance benefits from being near carriers, 3PLs, and drayage providers that already service the intermodal yard daily. Labor pools have built up around the corridor as well, with logistics-experienced workers concentrated in the area because so many large employers already operate there. That's a real advantage over trying to staff a facility in a part of DFW where industrial employment is thinner.

Don't assume speculative building automatically means soft leverage for tenants, either. With demand from manufacturers like MP Materials and Embraer competing for the same submarket as traditional distribution users, and with metro-wide industrial vacancy having fallen for seven straight quarters to 9.3 percent as of the second quarter of 2026 according to JLL, buildings that deliver into strong pre-leasing conditions aren't likely to sit empty long enough to force concessions the way they might have two years ago. Average asking rents across DFW sit close to 8.99 dollars a square foot right now, and a submarket with this much infrastructure and this much tenant diversity isn't going to be the cheapest option in the metro even when vacancy ticks up in a given quarter.

For businesses that genuinely need rail access, heavy power, or proximity to an increasingly automated logistics network, Alliance is close to a category of one in DFW right now. For everyone else, it's worth touring specifically to understand what's realistic for your size and budget rather than assuming the address alone solves your logistics problem. Talk to a tenant rep who knows which buildings in the AllianceTexas footprint fit a requirement your size, because the gap between a 1.2 million square foot spec building and the smaller product scattered through the same nine municipalities is bigger than the shared zip codes suggest.