Dallas, America’s ninth most populated city, is now a bonafide test bed for 5G and edge computing. Equinix, one of the world’s largest colocation data center providers, today opened an international business exchange data center in the city coupled with a 5G and edge computing proof-of-concept center.

The $142 million data center opened the same day that Digital Realty, one of the world’s largest wholesale data center providers, announced the availability of Vapor IO’s software-defined Kinetic Edge interconnection technology in Dallas and two other U.S. cities to test edge-native applications and workloads. 

The pair of announcements indicate that edge computing in a 5G environment is still very much in the experimental and testing phase. Following years of trials and development on separate tracks, the vision for mobile edge computing is still meandering down a path to find use cases that can deliver revenue and new business opportunities.

Equinix characterizes its 5G and Edge Proof of Concept Center in Dallas as a “sandbox” for customers to test and validate 5G and edge computing use cases for mobile network operators, cloud platforms, technology vendors, and enterprises. The company also wants to explore scenarios that enable hybrid mutli-cloud interconnectivity between mobile network operators, public clouds, and private networks.

The new four-story data center is Equinix’s ninth facility in the Dallas metro area and it includes a capacity of 1,975 cabinets and colocation space of about 72,000 square feet. Further expansion plans will bring that to a total capacity of more than 3,850 cabinets and 144,000 square feet of colocation space, according to Equinix.

The company’s footprint in Dallas houses more than 135 network service providers and it claims the new data center is the fifth-most-dense interconnection hub in the U.S. The colocation facilities serve companies in banking, commerce, telecommunications, technology, energy, health care, medical research, transportation, and logistics, according to Equinix.

“We are seeing significant customer demand in Dallas as enterprises look to increase their business offerings through implementing IT infrastructures that are able to keep pace with the continually evolving digital landscape,” Jon Lin, president of Equinix’s Americas business, said in a prepared statement.

Equinix said its platform reaches nearly 9,7000 customers and its Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric provides access to more than 2,100 of the world’s largest businesses, including cloud hyperscalers and software-as-a-service providers. The company now operates at least 210 data centers in 56 markets and 26 countries.

“Connectivity is becoming increasingly critical for the development of modern hybrid cloud and mobile environments, and Dallas is a key market in enabling companies to accelerate their 5G strategies and overall digital transformation journey,” Stephanie Williams, analyst at 451 Research, said in a prepared statement. “The Dallas multi-tenant data center market remains among the top five in the U.S.”