“Each one of these data centers is a little gold mine cranking out wealth for the city,” he said.

Its largest is Digital Realty, which sits on a 69-acre campus that was once occupied by Collins Radio, a military contractor in the early days of aerospace. Fortified by an eight-foot spiked fence, Digital Dallas, as it is known locally, is a corporate flagship with eight buildings. Four serve multiple tenants; the others each serve large single tenants. The still-growing complex will ultimately encompass 10 or 11 buildings and total more than 1.1 million square feet, said Bryan Marsh III, a vice president and portfolio manager for Digital Realty.

In Plano, one of the area’s growing data center markets, Aligned Data Centers, a division of Aligned Energy, has opened a center that offers a “pay-as-you-go” program in power usage. It enables clients to sharply curtail power costs by paying only for power they use, instead of locking into costly arrangements upfront, said Aligned Energy’s chief executive, Jakob Carnemark.

Image Digital Realty’s data center in Richardson, Tex. Companies like Aligned, Alliance Texas and Digital Realty are finding a booming market in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Credit... Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

While much of the data center development in North Texas has been clustered in the Dallas corridor, government and business leaders on the western side of the metropolitan region have been waging an aggressive effort to lure more data centers toward Fort Worth and its surrounding communities.

At AllianceTexas, data centers have added another dimension to the development that Mr. Perot, the son of the computer magnate H. Ross Perot, started assembling more than 30 years ago in wheat fields and ranch land about 15 miles from downtown Fort Worth.

Developed by Hillwood, a company founded by the younger Mr. Perot, Alliance encompasses an airport, houses more than 425 companies and has a bustling town center and upscale homes. Facebook’s will be its fifth, and by far largest, data center.

Mr. Perot, 57, said the growth of data centers at Alliance struck a nostalgic chord, recalling how, as a boy, he used to collect old punch cards when his father was running Electronic Data Systems in the 1960s. “I’m one of the few kids that grew up in data centers,” he said.