More details emerge about $10 billion Fort Worth data center
Earlier this year, a group of men walked into small store located at Weston Gardens in east Fort Worth.
They wanted to make the longtime owner, Sue Weston, an offer she couldn’t refuse — an offer that would add the historic garden center to a list of nearby homes and farms to be redeveloped into a mysterious project.
“They said, ‘We’re an oil and gas company, and we’re just buying land out here.’ They didn’t say what it was for,” Weston said.
Weston told the developers that there wasn’t a dollar amount they could offer that would convince her to sell.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Weston said.
The men represented a group of developers looking to turn a square-shaped area of land nestled between the cities of Fort Worth, Arlington, Forest Hill, and Kennedale into a data center. Since January, more than 400 acres have been rezoned to make way for the project — but developers aren’t done yet.
All told, according to Bob Riley — a consultant hired by Black Mountain — the company is looking to rezone roughly 500 acres for the data center. That land will be turned into multiple buildings, which will be available to multiple tenants to use.
Behind the proposal is Black Mountain Power, a subsidiary of a larger Fort Worth-based energy development company founded by Rhett Bennett in 2007. Bennett is an energy entrepreneur who sits on several Fort Worth boards. The company has subsidiaries dedicated to EV battery materials, mining, and sand mining in addition to oil and gas.
In 2017, Black Mountain’s oil and gas subsidiary sold roughly 21,000 net surface acres of land to Marathon Oil for $700 million. That same subsidiary owns more than 54,000 acres of land in south Texas.
Several homes in the data center’s footprint have been offered buyouts, according to Riley. He did not know how much money homeowners have been offered, or how many have been approached.
Some homes in the area are now vacant, Weston said, after homeowners took the money.
Black Mountain went before the Fort Worth Zoning Commission in December and asked the commission to recommend rezoning additional 42.06 acres from agricultural use to light industrial use. In January, Riley said, he will return to the commission to ask for another 40 acres of land.
For now, that will be Black Mountain’s last request for rezoning, bringing the total proposed footprint for the data center to nearly 500 acres.
The area where Black Mountain wants to build the data center is made up of quiet subdivisions, family farms, and businesses. The data center proposed there could be one of the largest in north Texas as demand for infrastructure to support artificial intelligence has soared.
In November, Google announced a $40 billion investment to develop more data centers in Texas. In 2024, a 292-acre data center operated by the Dallas-based tech firm DataBank Holdings Ltd. opened in Red Oak.
Earlier this year, the first phase of an 875-acre Oracle data center opened in Abilene as part of the $500 billion ‘Stargate’ program — a massive infrastructure push led by OpenAI to build data centers nationwide.
Black Mountain declined a request for an interview, and the company had not answered written questions as of Monday evening.
A spokesperson for the Fort Worth Zoning Commission referred questions to the City Council.
This story was originally published December 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
