Colovore files $430M Fort Worth data center permit a day after Texas pause

Colovore has filed for a permit to build a $430 million data center in the Denton County portion of Fort Worth, a filing that landed one day after Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on issuing data center permits, according to Connect CRE.

The application describes a one-story building with four data halls and 156,500 square feet of data center space, along with a 42,000-square-foot screened equipment yard and an administrative area, with an estimated start on Dec. 1 and completion on Dec. 1, 2028.

More than a month before the filing, the Fort Worth City Council began the process of implementing a 90-day moratorium on accepting, processing and approving new data center applications, according to Community Impact via Connect CRE; the governor's pause arrived the day before the application. How far the application gets is not something the coverage resolves.

Denton County would slot into a Texas footprint that already includes an Austin data center, sites under construction in Fort Worth and Mesquite, and a planned project in Johnson County, but the cost figure is worth reading against the developer's last Texas budget: the Hutto project this publication has covered broke ground in September at $280 million, down from a $500 million original price for nearly the same building. Whether Denton County reprices the same way is unknown, but the filing shows a sponsor willing to put a nine-figure number into a queue that two layers of government have just made longer.

The application reads like a developer underwriting the permitting calendar as the scarce asset, the place where data center capital now prices risk, ahead of the land itself.

The completion date is the tell. Dec. 1, 2028 lands in the year the build-over-buy trade has been aiming at, and the bet now carries a policy rider in the form of a pause order issued the day before the paperwork. The dates to watch are the council's 90-day process and Colovore's Dec. 1 start; the second is only reachable if the first clears.