$2B Data Center Project Moves Forward in Fort Worth

The Fort Worth city council has voted to provide tax incentives for a Spanish developer planning a five-building, two-phase data center project on 107 acres near Hicks Field Road in the northern part of the city. The developer is Madrid-based ACS, working through its U.S. subsidiary, Turner Construction Co.

The first phase is slated for completion by the end of 2031, with a second phase to be finished by the end of 2034. The precise design of the campus is still under consideration, but it will include a privately owned substation.

ACS is planning a total capital investment of at least $2 billion or more for the project. The full build-out would involve a minimum of $481 million in real property improvements and $1.7 billion in business personal property.

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The incentives are structured as a 10-year economic development program agreement and would start at 35 percent of incremental business personal property upon completion of the first phase. The agreement would increase to 70 percent of incremental business personal property after the completion of the project’s second phase.

In return, ACS must invest $481.6 million in real property improvements and nearly $1.7 billion in equipment, besides creating 37 positions that pay more than $150,000 a year.

The company is quite active in the data center sector. Late last year, Turner began work on a $2 billion project to expand Vantage Data Centers’ campus in New Albany, Ohio. Situated on 70 acres, the 1.5 million-square-foot data center will provide 192 megawatts of capacity to provide infrastructure for cloud technologies and AI.

Turner is also at work on a 700,000-square-foot hyperscale data center campus for Meta in Jeffersonville, Ind. Once operational, the $800 million facility will be wholly run on renewable energy through investments in new renewable energy projects and be LEED Gold.

Data center development boom in Texas

Texas continues to be a boom market for data centers, with much of the development in Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio as operators are attracted by relatively cheap energy. As AI grows in application, data centers will consume even more power.

According to the Texas State Comptroller, there are 279 data centers in the state, with 141 in DFW. In 2023, DFW alone was home to about 0.565 GW of data center inventory, the second-highest total in the U.S.

Such growth poses questions about the ability of Texas’ power grid to keep up with the increased demand. The state’s main electric grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas predicts that power demand in the state will nearly double by 2030, in large part due to major users like data centers, crypto mining facilities and hydrogen production plants.