When Suzanne and Anthony Stinson married in 1980, they moved to a pioneer-built house outside of Castroville and raised their children on land that had been in his family since the 1840s.
Back then, “it was all country out that way. You’d have to sit there for a while before a car would go by,” she said.
But after neighbors sold their land to Microsoft for what the Stinsons say was tens of thousands of dollars an acre, the couple now copes with dust and noise coming from the adjacent site where a data center has been under construction since 2022. The contractor put up plastic sheeting, at their request, and the couple planted a row of trees.
“It’s sad because they’re taking out agricultural production for cloud space, for computer data,” she said. “You just wonder, why do we need all this?”
In a county known more for farms that yield corn, cotton and hay than high-tech server farms, Microsoft is doubling down on the already massive data center.
As the construction site expands, so does the number of such facilities in rural Medina County forcing residents there to reckon with a kind of growth they never expected.
Located at Farm-to-Market Road 471 and Potranco Road, “SAT82” will be built next to data centers named SAT80-1 and SAT80-2, each with 106,000 square feet of space, on the same 206 acres where construction was started two years ago.
The expansion is expected to get underway in April and cost nearly $500 million, according to a state filing.
It follows another Microsoft data center that was built straddling the Bexar-Medina county lines and comes along about the same time another is planned for County Road 6712 between Lytle and Natalia.
Just west of Castroville, a data center is under construction on U.S. Highway 90, with about 124 acres cleared, though no state filing could be found for that location.
Where once there were thickets of legacy oak trees where cattle grazed lazily on green rolling hills is a gated and active construction site of stamped dirt and a bank of gray stone that appears to serve as a retaining wall.
Like SAT82, it shares a fence line with a family who has for years raised their families and farmed and ranched in the area.
Wide open spaces
Microsoft owns at least 12 parcels of land in Medina County, according to tax records. Many are contiguous parcels and all are located in the eastern part of the county.
The combination of cheap, available land and abundant energy resources is attracting companies like Microsoft to build data centers in the county, said Medina County Judge Keith Lutz.
SAT82 also qualified for a 15-year, 80% property tax abatement from the county, he said. Even with the tax abatement, data centers can generate revenue that’s equivalent in property taxes to almost 900 residential rooftops, Lutz added.
The state also offers tax breaks to qualifying data centers, including a temporary sales tax exemption and other incentives.
Officials welcome the development of giant server farms in the face of a population boom in the county.
“We have a tremendous amount of growth going on in this county — people growth — and with that growth comes a lot of challenges, lots of infrastructure [needs] … that we’re going to have to accomplish that are way bigger than just what the county citizens can handle,” Lutz said.
Medina County has a population of about 51,000, according to the 2022 American Community Survey. In the dozen years leading up to that survey, the county’s population increased 11 out of 12 years, with an average annual growth rate of 1.3%.
The largest annual population increase was 2.7% between 2020 and 2021, and the following year, the population grew again by 1.93%.
This influx is occurring in a county where there are 2,200 farms still family-owned, according to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture, and 2020 census data shows 84% of the population resides in a rural area.
“Sheer panic” is how Castroville Mayor Darrin Schroeder described the city’s reaction to the approaching sprawl from San Antonio and the development that’s occurring as landowners sell off their farms.
“We’ve had this influx of growth,” he said of residential and commercial projects already in progress in the city and adjacent to its borders. “The current development agreements have tripled the size of the city [and that’s] just with the ones that we’ve already nailed down. And we still have many more to go.”
The three-year mayor, speaking at a recent Northside Chamber of Commerce event, and other officials have mobilized, hiring an urban planning firm to help restructure the city’s development codes to preserve its small-town character. Schroeder works as an IT program manager for Microsoft.
Energy and water use
Across San Antonio, companies like Microsoft, Cyrus, Amazon Web Services and others have built more than a dozen data centers, the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing, the remote servers that provide computing services and storage to a vast array of internet users.
They are some of the 5,387 data centers in the U.S., most along the Atlantic seaboard, according to the network service procurement firm Cloudscene. The average data center building occupies about 100,000 square feet of space.
Data centers are the most energy-intensive types of buildings that exist and account for 2% of total energy use in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Unfortunately, the way the demand is going for these services, data centers will be constructed all over the place,” said Kanad Ghose, a computer science professor at Binghamton University in Canada.
Ghose directs a National Science Foundation-funded research center that is looking at the resource consumption of data centers. The increasing reliance on electronic devices is creating the demand and artificial intelligence software is “very dramatically” driving up power consumption, he said.
He estimates that based on the current trajectory of data center construction and electricity consumption, in five to seven years, “we will exceed the total electricity produced worldwide.”
Drought conditions
In addition to energy resources, data centers also use water to cool the servers that store the world’s digital data.
Data from the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) shows that, in 2023, 19 data center facilities in the utility’s service area bought about 31 billion gallons of potable water and 151 million gallons of recycled water.
It sounds like a lot, but that level of consumption accounts for just 0.25% of all commercial accounts’ water use, according to SAWS.
“Commercial is a big broad sector that includes so many different kinds of customers,” said Karen Guz, vice president of water conservation at SAWS, and includes schools and apartment complexes. “In that context, data centers appear to have accounted for less than 1% of the volume of water sold to commercial in 2022 and 2023.”
When asked how much water the data center under construction on Highway 90 plans to use, the superintendent for the East Medina County Special Utility District, Bruce Alexander, said that the utility is working with Microsoft to determine the terms of a “non-standard service agreement” to provide water service.
As in many parts of the state, Medina County has been experiencing moderate to severe drought conditions since at least 2021. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates 24,500 acres of cornfields in Medina County are in drought-stricken areas.
A Microsoft spokesman responded to questions via email, stating only that Microsoft is making significant investments to grow its presence in Texas and that data centers are large-scale and complex projects.
Legacy land
In the last eight years, Microsoft has established at least seven data centers in San Antonio and one in Medina County. The first two were built in 2015 at $90 million each.
Ghose said Microsoft tends to work harder at conserving resources than other data center operators he has studied. “I have to say they are actually quite good stewards of the environment,” he said.
The Seattle-based company uses potable water and heat exchangers that don’t require as much water for cooling, he said. Microsoft also attempts to reduce its reliance on local energy sources.
“What big companies have done, like Microsoft, is buy a big parcel of land and they generate their own energy much more efficiently,” Ghose said. Often, they use natural gas, he added. “And in Texas, I suspect they do use wind farms as well.”
Medina County resident Clay Binford remembers the exact day he called and found out Microsoft’s plans for the land next to his, 140 pristine acres along Highway 90 where he raises cattle. “It was April 28, 2022. … It did not go well,” he said.
Binford is a municipal bond attorney who helps the county with economic development agreements, including the one approved by Medina County commissioners for the center next to the Stinsons’ property.
Since construction began this year, Binford’s been coping with excessive light, dust, noise and smoke “from burning legacy oak trees,” he said. He’s also worried about the potential for flooding and runoff as the topography is modified during construction for the 247,000-square-foot facility.
He’s been dissatisfied so far with the response from company representatives about what he considers a “non-conforming use” of the land.
The property once belonged to his father, he said. “It’s very important to me as a legacy, and unfortunately, the future is significantly clouded both literally and figuratively.”
Binford is now under contract to sell the land and his home, a transaction that he said, “feels like a death in the family.”
