Austin ranks fifth in U.S. industrial expansion

With all of activity around logistics centers and the like in the suburbs north of Austin and around Elon-ville, it might not come as a surprise that Austin is a major player in the industrial development department.

While outpaced by cities such as Dallas, L.A., and Savannah, Ga. (?), Texas' capital city is  home to the nation's fifth-largest metro in industrial expansion, according to a new CommercialSearch report.

Austin has 18.2 million square feet of industrial supply currently under construction. The largest industrial development, naturally, will be Samsung’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Facility in Taylor, Texas, totaling 6 million square feet of industrial space, expected to be delivered in the fourth quarter of this year.

At 130 million square feet of total inventory as of January, the Austin industrial market is undersized compared to other Texas cities with longer-standing traditions. Nevertheless, as CommercialSearch notes, there is more than 18 million square feet of Austin industrial space in the pipeline — 14 percent of the city’s current stock — indicating that developers are making strides in fulfilling new-found demand in the burgeoning advanced manufacturing hub.

While many of Austin’s 84 industrial buildings scheduled to be completed in 2024 are warehouses in logistics parks, the metro’s largest developments currently being built are both manufacturing facilities: Samsung’s 6-million-square-foot semiconductor factory and the 1.4-million-square-foot battery cathode building being added to Tesla’s Giga Texas factory.