Why Alliance Keeps Landing DFW's Biggest Industrial Deals, and Why Small-Bay Tenants Should Be Watching Too

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 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, supporting something like 73,000 jobs. 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 real. Private and public investment in AllianceTexas topped $18.3 billion in 2025 alone - about $16.7 billion from private developers and tenants, roughly $1.6 billion in public infrastructure across the nine municipalities the development spans. Since 1990, the area has generated $4.6 billion in property taxes for local cities and school districts. What draws tenants here isn't just land - though Hillwood still controls enough of it to keep building at a pace no one else in DFW can match - it's the connectivity stacked on top of that land: Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport for air cargo, I-35W running straight through, and BNSF's Alliance Intermodal Facility, a 500-plus-acre rail yard handling more than a million container lifts a year and sending 50 to 60 outbound trains a week to the ports of LA, Long Beach, and Houston. For a tenant whose freight moves by rail, there's no comparable setup anywhere else in DFW.

That advantage just got a significant upgrade. Hillwood, BNSF, and the City of Fort Worth launched the Alliance Logistics District in late 2025, a nearly 1,400-acre zone built around the rail facility designed for autonomous vehicle operations, CDL-free hostler moves, and heavy-haul freight over 80,000 pounds - an early bet on where freight operations are heading rather than a retrofit after the fact.

The tenant roster has moved well past pure e-commerce fulfillment. Recent additions include Wistron (electronics manufacturing), MP Materials (rare earth processing tied to defense and tech supply chains), and Embraer (aerospace), alongside the big logistics and 3PL operators that built the corridor's original reputation. That diversification matters if you're worried about overexposure to one sector's boom-and-bust cycle - and it's part of why data center and power-hungry users have started competing for the same large sites, adding a new wrinkle to how developers decide what to build next.

Hillwood isn't slowing down on construction either. 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, 3,000 amps of power, 190-foot truck courts, and 276 trailer spaces expandable to 504 - built with autonomous vehicle operations in mind and fully speculative, with no tenant attached as of this writing. Completion is targeted for mid-2027. That's one building; AllianceTexas has delivered more than 60 million square feet of speculative industrial space over its history, with four more Hillwood projects totaling 3.2 million square feet planned within Fort Worth city limits alone.

Not everything being built is a mega-box, though, and that's worth tenants under 150,000 square feet paying attention to. Holt Lunsford Commercial Investments recently announced Eagle Alliance Crossing, a five-building Class A park totaling roughly 515,000 square feet on about 50 acres - averaging close to 100,000 square feet per building. For years the Alliance story was all giants: Amazon, FedEx, Walmart, and the big Hillwood distribution campuses. Developers are now also chasing the 50,000-to-150,000-square-foot user who needs dock doors and trailer parking and has been underserved while the headlines went to the big spec buildings. Land that works in this corridor is getting scarcer and more expensive, so a developer who can pencil a mid-size project here has an edge - and a tenant whose lease runs out in 2027 should know that a project announced today won't deliver until well into next year.

If you 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, and large-block users generally still have real options since that's exactly the size range developers build for. If your requirement sits in the middle, 50,000 to 150,000 square feet, talk to ownership groups while a project like Eagle Alliance Crossing is still on paper - you can often lock in better rent, free rent, and TI dollars before the first slab pours than you will competing for a finished building later. Alliance has never been the cheapest address in DFW, and with metro-wide vacancy having fallen for seven straight quarters, that's not changing soon. But for tenants who need scale, modern specs, or proximity to the workforce and carriers already built up around this ecosystem, it remains one of the few places in DFW still building like the growth story hasn't slowed at all.