AT&T’s decision to pull its global headquarters out of downtown Dallas and relocate across North Texas marks one of the region’s most consequential corporate shifts in years. The move, centered on a new base in Plano, reshapes the balance of power between the urban core and its booming suburbs while raising pointed questions about what kind of city center Dallas wants to be. As the telecom giant redraws its own map, the ripple effects will touch everything from commercial property values to transit planning and the future of work.
AT&T’s North Texas pivot, explained
AT&T has announced that it will move its corporate headquarters from downtown Dallas to a new campus in Plano, effectively ending a long era in which the company’s name was synonymous with the city’s central business district. Executives have framed the relocation as a strategic reset that aligns the company’s physical footprint with how its employees actually work, with more emphasis on collaboration spaces and less on traditional high-rise offices. In a televised segment, Jan and NBC reporter David Goins described how the telecommunications giant is preparing to exit its current complex in Dal’s central core and consolidate operations on a purpose built site that can support its next phase of growth, a shift that underscores how even legacy firms are rethinking what a headquarters should look like in a hybrid era, as detailed in coverage of the Plano move.
Company leaders have been clear that this is not a retreat from North Texas but a reorientation within it, with Plano emerging as the new corporate hub while Dallas remains a major employment center. The relocation is scheduled to be completed by 2028, giving both cities a multi year runway to adjust budgets, infrastructure plans, and development strategies. For Dallas, the departure of such a prominent tenant from the skyline is a symbolic blow that city officials are already working to spin into an opportunity to reimagine the AT&T Discovery District and surrounding blocks. For Plano, the announcement validates years of investment in corporate campuses and mixed use neighborhoods that have turned the suburb into a magnet for Fortune 500 names.
The Plano campus and its EDS legacy
AT&T is not moving into a blank slate. The company is taking over a Plano property with deep roots in North Texas corporate history, a campus originally opened by EDS in 1992 that helped define the suburban office park model of its era. That site, which includes two eight story buildings connected by an upper level bridge, was once a symbol of how technology and financial services firms spread across the region in search of land, parking, and room to grow. By choosing this location, AT&T is effectively layering a new generation of telecom and media operations on top of the physical infrastructure that EDS built more than three decades ago, a continuity that underscores how corporate geography in the region evolves more than it resets, as described in detail in reporting on the EDS opened campus.
The Plano campus is set to be transformed again to fit AT&T’s needs, with plans that include updated collaboration areas, modernized infrastructure, and amenities designed to compete with other major corporate centers in the United States and Canada. The site’s history as a home for large scale operations, including previous tenants such as Bank of America, gives AT&T a tested platform for housing thousands of employees in a horizontal layout rather than a vertical tower. In my view, that continuity matters because it shows how North Texas suburbs have been quietly building the bones of a corporate ecosystem for decades, long before the latest wave of relocations made headlines.
Why Plano beat Downtown Dallas
AT&T’s leadership has framed the move as a choice about how best to run a modern multinational corporation, not a referendum on Dallas itself. In a public announcement from DALLAS, executives emphasized that the company, one of North Texas’s biggest employers, needed a headquarters environment that could support a more flexible, tech driven workforce and global operations. The new Plano base, they argued, offers the kind of integrated campus where teams can collaborate across functions without the constraints of a dense high rise footprint in Downtown Dallas, a rationale that was laid out when the company confirmed it would shift its global headquarters to Plano from Downtown Dallas…