Virginia data center firm buys land in Black Mountain’s Fort Worth campus
A new player may be entering the chat in the back-and-forth over Fort Worth-based Black Mountain’s proposed data center campus near Fort Worth’s border with Everman and Forest Hill.
Virginia-based data center developer EdgeConneX purchased roughly 171 acres of the southeast Fort Worth development in September 2025, according to Tarrant County deed records and data from the Tarrant Appraisal District.
The purchase came as Black Mountain had already begun rezoning land for its data center campus. Three months earlier, in June, the city had rezoned 4401 Enon Road — one of the properties purchased by EdgeConneX — for the Black Mountain data center.
EdgeConneX purchased the land from two limited liability corporations connected to real estate investor and affordable home developer David Zulejkic, according to deed documents, information from the Texas Comptroller’s Office and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.
Zulejkic’s company, First Step Homes, planned to build nearly 300 prefabricated homes at 4401 Enon Road — but the plans never materialized.
Documents filed with the Tarrant County Clerk’s office also show that Black Mountain entered into an agreement with EdgeConneX to buy back the land if certain conditions are met.
The document — called a memorandum of repurchase agreement — does not give specifics about the conditions that would trigger Black Mountain to buy back the land from EdgeConneX.
Neither Zulejkic nor representatives for Black Mountain and EdgeConneX responded to multiple emails and phone calls from the Star-Telegram requesting comment.
The city of Fort Worth’s permitting website shows two water department loading studies connected to the site, but does not list an owner and describes the project as “*confidential* data center.”
EdgeConneX operates 28 data centers in North America, and is developing a 130-acre campus in Bastrop County southeast of Austin. The company plans to build four data centers on the site with the capacity to require up to 240,000 megawatts of electricity.
That’s roughly equivalent to the amount of power needed to power 60 million homes during peak usage, according to estimates from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Enon Road land was zoned for homes
In 2022, the Fort Worth City Council rezoned 4401 Enon Road for a 77-acre housing development with 298 manufactured homes.
The development was meant to be the second phase of another development that was approved in 2020, but never left the planning phase.
Everman City Manager Craig Spencer wrote a letter to the city of Fort Worth expressing concerns about traffic, flooding, and whether a manufactured housing development was the proper way to encourage job growth in Fort Worth’s suburbs. The city of Everman’s borders are roughly a mile from the property.
On Oct. 10, a day before the housing project was approved in Fort Worth, the city of Everman entered into a development agreement with SFW 75 LLC — which later sold that land to EdgeConneX — for the housing development.
The agreement called for the developer to share information about the drainage study process for the project with the city of Everman.
The housing development never came to fruition, though.
“We had radio silence from them after the execution of that development agreement,” Spencer said.
The next time Spencer heard about the land he said, was after Black Mountain had begun considering it as part of the data center.
The data center debate
The city of Fort Worth is considering updates to its rules around data center development at a time when an increasing number of residents are expressing concerns about the potential impact of such developments.
The rules would restrict data center water use by requiring closed loop cooling systems, and would increase set back requirements to put more space between data center buildings and nearby homes and businesses.
A city webpage on data center policy states that 100 acres with a closed loop cooled data center would use 300,000 to 1 million gallons of water per month, compared to 2 million gallons if the same 100 acres were populated by single family homes.
Still some residents at a June 30 city open house worried the city’s proposed rules wouldn’t go far enough, with an increasingly vocal group of local activists pushing the city to impose a moratorium on all data center development.
However, assistant city manager Jesica McEachern cautioned the City Council at a June 2 work session that state law limits moratoriums to 90 days and the moratorium process would add several procedural steps pushing out the start date to October at the earliest.
Instead, the City Council plans to vote on a slate of rule changes at its 6 p.m. meeting on Aug. 11.
In addition to water and building requirements, the rule updates would put noise restrictions on data centers and introduce higher thresholds for offering data center developers economic incentives.
Black Mountain, meanwhile, still has three zoning cases pending before the city.
A site plan for a 187-acre parcel southeast of the intersection of Lon Stephenson Road and Forest Hill Drive is expected to go before the City Council at its 11 a.m. meeting on Aug. 25.
The other two zoning cases covering roughly 80 acres on the east and southern ends of the development are expected to go before the City Council at its 6 p.m. meeting on Dec. 8.
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