LITEON puts $919M into McKinney, in a spec building it didn't build

Taiwan’s LITEON Technology is putting $919 million into a McKinney manufacturing campus, and the detail that matters to developers is that it isn’t building it. The company is spending $108.5 million to acquire more than 650,000 square feet of existing industrial space inside Core5 Logistics Center, a near-$1B occupier absorbing finished North Texas product rather than breaking ground.

Why it matters

This is a site-selection datapoint on where the AI hardware supply chain lands, and it cuts against the assumption that a manufacturer of this size arrives as a build-to-suit. LITEON bought speed. Existing shells in a delivered logistics park got it to production in 2027; a ground-up campus would not have. For developers holding spec industrial in Collin County, that is the case for the product: the exit was an advanced-manufacturing user paying to skip the construction timeline, not the third-party logistics tenant the building was underwritten for.

It also clarifies what this facility is, because the category gets blurred. LITEON is not building a data center. It makes power supplies, power racks, power management systems and backup battery units for servers and telecom equipment, the electrical guts that go inside someone else’s data center. The state describes the work as AI power and infrastructure-related solutions. The demand is downstream of the AI buildout, which means it carries the same cycle risk as the buildout itself.

The counterweight arrived locally. McKinney ISD’s board of trustees unanimously denied LITEON’s requested JETI agreement, a property-tax reduction on the development. The deal is proceeding anyway, a useful reminder that school-district abatement is not the load-bearing incentive it is often assumed to be.

The numbers

Texas approved a $3.5 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant and a $100,000 Veteran Created Job Bonus. The initial phase is $307 million and 500 jobs, growing past 600 over the project’s life. Operations are expected in 2027, with hiring phased as renovations complete. The campus expands LITEON’s existing Plano operations. Acreage has not been disclosed.

What’s next

Watch whether the rest of the $919 million goes into the existing footprint or triggers new construction, the gap between the $108.5 million purchase and the headline figure is equipment and fit-out, not land, until proven otherwise. Watch, too, whether other Core5 space trades to power-chain suppliers following LITEON in. More at the Dallas hub.