A North Carolina developer has acquired a large parcel of land in Durham, five months after receiving rezoning approval from the city for a 300-acre mixed-use development. 

Charlotte-based Beacon Partners bought 119 acres in southeast Durham in a $20M deal with longtime partner Stephens Enterprises, the Triangle Business Journal reported.

The land will be used for mixed-use industrial buildings that will be part of a development called Durham Gateway. 

The 119 acres are along Highway 70 and Leesville Road on the edge of Brier Creek. Stephens put the land up for sale in January 2023. 

Durham Gateway is a joint venture with HM Partners and SFRE Holdings. It comprises 1,750 residential units and 1.3M SF of industrial and commercial space that will be built out in two phases. Beacon received rezoning approval for the 300-acre development from the Durham City Council five months ago.

CBRE’s Ann-Stewart Patterson, Austin Nagy and John Hogan handled the leasing and marketing for the project.

While there was some backlash to Durham Gateway when the project was approved in September 2025, Mayor Leo Williams said it would bring substantial benefits to the community.

Beacon has agreed to donate $1M to the Durham Dedicated Housing Fund, $50K to Durham Public Schools’ capital needs, and $350K to a fire and emergency services grant project. Williams also said the project would feature affordable housing options.

The ride is nearly over for the Six Flags America and Hurricane Harbor amusement park in Prince George’s County, Maryland. 

An aerial view of Six Flags America in Prince George’s County, Maryland

The park is planning to close after this year’s operating season on Nov. 2, Six Flags Entertainment Corp. announced Thursday. 

Six Flags CEO Richard Zimmerman said it determined the park is “not a strategic fit” in its long-term growth plan. The company said it retained CBRE to market the 500-acre property for sale as a redevelopment play.

“After reviewing a number of options, we believe that marketing the property for redevelopment will generate the highest value and return on investment,” Zimmerman said in a statement. “We anticipate strong interest in the property and will continue to strategically pursue portfolio optimization opportunities as we work to unlock the full value of our portfolio.” 

The park sits just off MD-193 in Bowie, about 14 miles east of D.C. It opened as a Six Flags park in 1999, but the property had previously operated as a wildlife preserve since 1974, The Washington Post reported. 

The park has 70 full-time employees who will be laid off when it closes, with severance and benefits, Six Flags said. Zimmerman called it a “difficult decision” and said the company will work to support its employees. 

The Charlotte-based company said in November it would consider selling some parks after its $8B merger with Cedar Fair Entertainment. Six Flags operates 27 amusement parks, 15 water parks and nine resort properties across North America. 

Prince George’s acting County Executive Tara Jackson and the Prince George’s County Economic Development Corp. didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The closure is the latest in a series of blows to the economy of one of America’s richest majority-Black counties. 

Earlier this week, the NFL’s Washington Commanders announced the team plans to leave the county’s Northwest Stadium, which is located about 7 miles west of Six Flags, in 2030 to play in a new stadium at D.C.’s RFK Stadium site. Jackson said the county will work on a “bold vision” to redevelop the Northwest Stadium site. 

In March, President Donald Trump said he would halt the planned move of the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt. 

The county also lost a major private employer in tech company 2U, which had occupied more than 300K SF in New Carrollton before going into bankruptcy and then moving to a smaller space in Northern Virginia. And it has more than 30,000 federal jobs and additional contracting jobs that could be at risk from Trump’s cuts to federal agencies. 

Alliance Industrial Company purchased 66.75 acres of land near the Northeast Georgia Inland Port in Gainesville, Georgia. The company will develop two speculative industrial buildings totaling 540,408 square feet. Building 100 will be 113,536 square feet and Building 200 will be 426,872 square feet. The park will be named Alliance 985 Business Park.

Avison Young’s Chris Hoag, Jason Holland, and Andrew Joyner arranged the transaction on behalf of Alliance and have been tapped to handle leasing. Stephen Lovett and Zach Tibbs of Norton Commercial represented one of the four parcels of land.

Alliance will break ground on the project in Q1 2025 and is slated to deliver in early 2026. With immediate access to I-985 and within 15 miles of I-85, the park offers excellent connectivity to local, regional, and national distribution channels. Tenants will benefit from proximity to key logistics hubs such as UPS and FedEx.

Provident Data Centers and American Real Estate Partners’ PowerHouse Data Centers have formed a joint venture to build a data center campus near Dallas slated to be one of the largest such complexes in the United States.

Provident and AREP’s PowerHouse Data Centers plan to build the hyperscale-focused campus on 768 acres between Dallas and Fort Worth in Grand Prairie, Texas. The multi-phase project will initially leverage about 500 megawatts of committed power, with the potential to scale up to 1.8 gigawatts at full build-out, according to Provident.

Construction on the site — which sits north of Route 67 and close to Google’s data center complex in neighboring Midlothian, Texas — is set to begin in the second quarter of 2025, with power delivery secured for May 2026. While neither party in the joint venture shared their total investment in the project, Provident touted at least $5B in direct construction impact over the course of the multi-year build-out. 

The nearly 2 gigawatts of capacity planned for Grand Prairie would place the campus among the largest in both the booming DFW data center market and nationally, even as the data center sector is increasingly dominated by massive projects serving tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta.  

“We were motivated to form this partnership due to Provident’s extensive experience in large-scale infrastructure and deep Texas roots, combined with PowerHouse’s focus on hyperscale solutions,” Provident Principal Strategist Jack Backes said in an email to Bisnow. “This created a partnership uniquely positioned to deliver a facility that meets the growing needs of global hyperscalers with speed, scalability, and efficiency.”

The JV between Provident and PowerHouse brings together two firms pursuing aggressive growth in the hyperscale data center market.  

Dallas-based Provident’s data center footprint entails 50 buildings in six states, totaling 3.8 gigawatts of power. The firm’s portfolio is centered in Texas, with data centers in operation or being developed in seven cities across the state, according to the company’s website. 

Development plans include a seven-building data center campus in Burns Harbor, Indiana, which Provident first proposed in August. But Backes tells Bisnow its latest Texas project previews an upcoming push to expand its presence in the market, targeting the world’s largest tech firms.  

“This project is also part of Provident’s broader vision for hyperscale growth,” Backes said. “Provident is preparing to leverage its 30 years of experience to deliver future developments independently through vertical construction in the data center space.”

PowerHouse’s hyperscale expansion is already well underway. The Virginia-based company says it has 87 buildings and 25.5M SF in planning underway or completed, representing over 5.9 gigawatts of power across 6 U.S. markets. 

As with the planned campus in Grand Prairie, PowerHouse’s swollen development pipeline is being executed largely through joint ventures. 

The largest of these JVs, announced in August, is a partnership with fellow data center firm Chirisa and asset manager Blue Owl to build a series of data centers anchored by AI cloud provider CoreWeave that could ultimately deploy more than $5B. The JV’s initial buildout is slated for a campus near Richmond, Virginia, that could ultimately exceed a gigawatt of capacity, with further development expected in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Kentucky and Nevada. 

Less than a month later, PowerHouse unveiled a separate JV with investment management firm Town Lane. The partnership acquired a 122-acre site in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it plans to offer 300 megawatts of capacity across five buildings by 2027. 

An earlier development joint venture between AREP and investment firm Harrison Street formed in late 2021 has also fueled much of PowerHouse’s growth trajectory. This year, the two firms broke ground on both the first phase of an 800-megawatt campus in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and a 65-megawatt project in Reno, Nevada. The partners sold one of their co-developed data centers in Northern Virginia to CyrusOne last month.

The JV with Harrison Street has helped PowerHouse push into the DFW market, launching a 200-megawatt project on 50 acres in Irving, TX last spring.  

Amid a nationwide data center development boom, the DFW metroplex has remained one of the industry’s strongest growth markets. The region trails only Northern Virginia in leased critical IT Power with 776 megawatts, according to 451 Research. At the end of the second quarter of last year, JLL reported that Dallas ranked fourth in capacity planned or under construction with a pipeline exceeding 3000 megawatts. 

The data center industry’s growth across Texas has sparked growing concerns about the impact of gigawatt-scale campuses on the stability of the ERCOT power grid and power prices for consumers, with some politicians suggesting pumping the breaks on future development. But Provident’s Backes insists that the company’s project with PowerHouse in Grand Prairie is paired with energy infrastructure investments that, along with collaboration with utilities, will ensure these concerns don’t come to fruition.

“Our development is designed to enhance grid stability rather than strain it,” Backes said. “Provident has spent the past two years working closely with ERCOT and Oncor ensuring that the project not only avoids price increases for consumers but also strengthens grid resilience and reliability.”