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The San Antonio area, and a booming Medina County to the west of the Alamo City, continue to attract Amazon and Microsoft Data Centers.
Recent filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation show Microsoft plans to construct two additional data centers at its location on County Road 381 in the community of Rio Medina at a cost of $52 million.
Work on both additions starts this spring and should be completed within a couple of years. Combined, they will cover nearly half-a-million square feet.
Meanwhile, similar filings find Amazon is expanding its data center presence in the San Antonio area with two of the facilities, both each well over 100,000 square feet. One will be built on the Southeast Side on Donop Road at a cost of $65 million and the other is planned on the West Side on Northwest Crossroads at a cost of $25 million.
Their completion dates fall within the next two or three years.
The demands such centers place on water for cooling and on electricity for power have become concerns for local residents, especially the demand on water in a time of drought. They are also known to be noisy to live around.
The San Antonio City Council may formally address local policy for the industry this year. San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones told Texas Public Radio in February that such data centers are not going unnoticed at city hall.
"We know these things are coming," she said. "That doesn't mean they can show up wherever they want to. We certainly have some say in that. And we want to make sure we are thinking about impact on utilities. And we're also thinking about what makes the best place in terms of location in the city."
CPS Energy and the San Antonio Water System told city councilmembers last week there were more than 20 data centers in the area, and more are coming. But top-ranking executives of both utilities expressed confidence in keeping up with the demands of the data center industry.
Texas Public Radio also reached out Monday to Medina County Judge Keith Lutz for comment on his county's growing data center industry but was told he was not available for comment for the day.
Pia Orrenius, a vice president and labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, said in February that the AI boom and construction of data centers in Texas in 2026 ranks Texas only second to Virginia in the data center industry.
