Rhett Bennett, CEO of Black Mountain Energy (right), hosted a private meeting to discuss plans for a $10B data center on Wednesday. (Photo by Katie Serrano)
Locals left a meeting hosted by the developers of a new artificial intelligence data center in Fort Worth with more questions than answers.
Residents voiced their concerns over a new $10 billion data center during a contentious meeting at a local hotel in Forest Hills Wednesday night.
The meeting was organized by Black Mountain Power LLC—the developers behind the project—and was meant to show the current site plan for a new AI data center, which would be built on vacant land near Forest Hill Drive and Lon Stephenson Road.
But attendees were quick to voice their opposition to the development, holding up “No Black Mountain” signs and asking Rhett Bennett, CEO of Black Mountain Energy, the company that controls Black Mountain Power, and business consultant, Bob Riley, about the impact it will have on the environment, noise pollution, traffic, and their electric bills.
They also questioned why it’s being built so close to Fort Worth Southeast Landfill, which is located around three miles from the proposed site, and shared concerns about the impact the center will have on local water supply and quality.
Large data centers can use as much as 5 million gallons of water a day, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
The majority of their questions went unanswered.
“We’re happy to do a more informational session, but what we had set up tonight was to actually go over the plan development, and so that’s exactly what we’re taking questions on,” Bennett told the room. “If everybody wants to come back in two weeks and do a couple-hour session, we can bring our operating partners and we can have a long session, but in general, what we are trying to do tonight is show people what the potential building layout would be and answer questions on that.”
Throughout 2025, the Fort Worth City Council approved several of Black Mountain’s requests to rezone more than 400 acres of land to build the center.
Now, the company is requesting to rezone even more land, which would border Forest Hill. But their latest request has been postponed until the council can receive a briefing on the impact of data centers on local infrastructure following community pushback.
If all the zoning change requests are approved by the council, the company’s land for the data center would total around 530 acres, and consist of four buildings that are 70 feet tall and cover more than 1 million square feet.
Angie Rieza, a Fort Worth resident who lives in a mobile home park near the land Black Mountain wants to develop, told the CEO that they weren’t notified about the development in a timely manner or had any say in the matter.
“We never got a letter about this until July,” Rieza said during the meeting. “We didn’t know anything about it. Y’all need to do better. Fort Worth needs to do better.”
Carlie Jones, the mayor pro tem of Forest Hills, also attended, and asked Bennett and Riley to show some compassion and understanding to concerned residents.
“ I check every piece of mail, and I didn’t get anything notifying me about this,” Jones told Bennett. “That’s hindsight now, but I hear these people’s frustrations. We need you to understand their level of frustration, especially when they’re not notified. No one’s communicating how what you’re building will affect us, our streets, our infrastructure, atmosphere, all of that.”
Ultimately, community members are feeling shut out, according to one attendee.
“ Community autonomy is something I’m a huge advocate for, so just seeing that the community’s been shut out and has not been properly reached out to is a huge concern,” Arlington resident Jaime Perkins told COURIER Texas after the meeting.“The impact that this is going to have, this thing is going to be massive. It’s going to create a huge strain on our electric grid and on our water resources in the area.”
Both Bennett and Riley said the company would schedule a second meeting with residents in the coming weeks to answer questions about any environmental concerns, but showed no signs of altering any of their plans.
Data centers are continuing to boom in Texas. In November, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a $40 billion investment in data centers statewide.
Texas has the second most in the country behind Virginia, and out of over 400 developments, nearly half of them are located in North Texas.
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