Is the data center disguised as a house in a residential area? The lair of the super villain? What else? Let’s take a look.
From the outside, this is a sufficiently ordinary house. It may be a bit large compared to other properties near Dallas in the far north. The farther you scroll down the list, the stranger it gets, and this week caught the attention of Zillow Gone Wild, an Instagram account that records jaw-dropping real estate listings across the country.
Zero bed, one bath. Square feet: 5,768. Listing price: 989,000 US dollars. In a residential area, most houses are between 1,200 and 2,500 square feet, and the listing price is between $350,000.
You look at the pictures inside—the large fluorescent-lit space reminiscent of dull company offices, chemical laboratories, and county jail—only to feel even more confused. What exactly is this facility doing, from the outside, like other ordinary two-story houses in the suburbs of Dallas?
A unique property! The walls, floor and ceiling are made of concrete. This property can be used as a perfect storage place for large wine collections, art collections, multiple cars, or as the ultimate safe house. The building is connected to two power grids and is also equipped with a natural gas generator. In the event of a natural gas failure, the generator is powered by two diesel fuel tanks, so the possibility of power failure is very small. With office space as well as warehouse space and large outdoor areas, the property can be used in many ways.
I cannot get the real estate agent of the property to answer the call. The owner of a company that leases commercial space in the Dallas area did not respond to voice mail.
However, the listing quotation of the leased building provided by the owner understands this situation and calls it the “former AT&T data center building.” Tax records show that AT&T owned the property before 2011. The “rental” list also states that the property “can only be used as a data house”, so you may have to give up the dream of storing your wine collection or multiple cars here.
This facility is a potential web site built by a company we acquired. It has never been used and has been sold many years ago.
The detective on the Reddit post asked a related question-”Wtf found this strange compound in a residential area”-notice that there is a building that looks very similar across the alley. There are no attractive photos in the online real estate listing, but it is also very large for the community. Tax records show that AT&T still owns this.
So, what’s the matter with this strange compound in the residential area? The answer may not be as interesting as some theories I have seen on the Internet, “Super Villain Lair” is my favorite. Our hyper-connected world and all our information technology require physical infrastructure. Data centers, servers, and hardware must go somewhere. If for some reason they must enter a residential area, they may disguise the facility as a house. Although this is not a particularly good-looking house, it is not so obtrusive. This windowless fortress in Old East Dallas is also used for telecommunications.
Post time: Jul-30-2021