Austin’s Biggest Industrial Sales of 2023

Long a tech mecca, Austin is increasingly building not just the software that powers the world, but the industrial backbone that makes it all possible.

Spurring that buildout are a handful of mega-deals, like Tesla’s Gigafactory and Samsung’s chip plant. Those projects cost their developers billions of dollars, while creating entire ecosystems of third-party development nearby.

Just north of Austin, data centers are popping up along highways and power lines like bluebonnets.

“We have to build 100 additional cloud data centers because there are billions of dollars more in contracted demand than we currently can supply,” Larry Ellison, co-founder of Austin-based Oracle, said in a recent earnings call.

At the same time, the Austin metro continues to grow at breakneck pace. With traffic unbearably gridlocked, last-mile logistics and local storage warehouses are as in demand as ever.

These were the top industrial sales of the year in Austin:

The largest sale of the year goes to 130 Crossing, Ironwood Realty Partners’ massive industrial complex along State Highway 130 in Pflugerville. All told, the project contains over a million square feet of space.

About a third of all speculative buildings under construction in Austin sit along Highway 130

The area north of Austin, including Pflugerville, Round Rock and Hutto, has been a hotspot for industrial projects, as tech jobs, workers and manufacturing facilities flock to the area. Major projects in the area, called Silicon Hills, include Samsung’s multibillion-dollar semiconductor plant in Taylor and Prologis and Skybox’s $10 billion data center in Hutto.

Titan Development’s Gateway 35 Commerce Center took the No. 2 spot. The first building from the project, a 294,000-square-foot industrial asset, sold in 2022. The project sits on 20 acres at the intersection of Interstate 35 and Highway 130, making it well-located for ground transit.

Rounding out the top three was Freeport Tech Center South, HPI’s industrial development at 6320 East Stassney Lane. The development spans five buildings, with some still under construction, according to the firm’s website.

Nearly 2 million square feet of industrial space started construction in Austin in the third quarter, according to JLL. That was spread across 18 projects, even as interest rates made it harder to get affordable financing. Some 17.7 million square feet of industrial developments are in the pipeline, though more than a quarter belong to Tesla and Samsung alone.