Microsoft is clearing land for a massive new data center in far Northwest San Antonio while another new complex larger than 3½ football fields is well underway just across county lines.
Construction fencing spans several acres of the frontage road along State Highway 151, at Westover Link, behind which trees have been cleared for a data center costing an estimated $216 million to build. It is expected to be completed in early 2024.
Meanwhile, the Seattle-based tech giant’s campus on Wiseman Boulevard, a 411,000-square-foot complex known as SAT14, is getting larger by the day in four planned phases through 2024.
Now Microsoft has recently registered another data center under construction farther west, where the Bexar and Medina county lines meet, estimating the construction cost at $230 million.
These latest projects bring Microsoft’s total estimated investment in data centers in both counties to over $1.2 billion spent across eight properties since 2015, according to state filings.
Data centers are the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing, the system that connects the internet to your devices.
The average data center occupies about 100,000 square feet of space, according to DataCenters.com. The world’s largest is located in China and tops out at 6.3 million square feet of space, or 110 football fields.
Described by Microsoft as “purposely nondescript,” much like a distribution warehouse, data centers contain thousands of interconnected computer servers along with the equipment used to keep them running.
Though it takes several hundred workers to build a data center from the ground up, thus providing construction jobs for a period of time, only about 50 employees are posted in a typical data center.
But data processing, hosting and related industries employ 5,066 people in San Antonio with average earnings per job at $96,906, according to Greater: SATX, the economic development organization.
In 2013, the City Council approved a 15-year Chapter 380 tax reimbursement for Microsoft of 40% of city property taxes on real and personal property investment of $250 million in exchange for the creation of 20 “high-paying jobs” starting in 2016.
“Data centers are capital-intensive facilities that create significant and long-term new taxable value,” said Sarah Carabias Rush, chief economic development officer at Greater: SATX. “The new property tax revenue can be reinvested into the community to benefit residents of a location.”
In addition, with the investment required to build and maintain a data center, she said, there is less chance that a facility will shut down or relocate in the future.
Considered one of the most energy-intensive building types, according to the Department of Energy, data centers consume 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building.
As the world’s use of information technology grows, both data center growth and energy use are expected to increase.
Yet Microsoft has said it plans to shift 100% of its energy use to renewable energy sources by 2025, and by 2030, have all of its energy use matched by zero-carbon energy purchases.
Because water is the most common method for cooling data centers, it also makes them heavy water users. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that, in just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water, or about the same consumption as 100,000 homes.
Microsoft has a sustainability goal to replenish more water than it uses in its data centers by 2030.
Founded in 1975, the company today operates more than 300 data centers in 34 countries. Microsoft’s cloud revenue came to $28.5 billion in the first three months of the year, stated its quarterly report released in April, which is up 22% from the same period in 2022.
In some parts of the country, the demand for data centers is outpacing the supply of power and land, according to a report by Data Center Frontier. That’s not the case on the far West Side of San Antonio.
“Available land and reliable power make San Antonio a strong contender for capital-intensive projects,” such as data centers, Rush said.
“While we are not actively positioning San Antonio for data center operations, we are focused on ensuring that our San Antonio region has the available, large-scale, shovel-ready sites to accommodate users within our target sectors.”
Microsoft did not respond to a request for information about why it selected San Antonio for its data centers.
SAT40, the data center Microsoft is building at 15000 Lambda Drive in the Texas Research Park, is a $175.9 million project going up on 70 acres near State Highway 211.
The building will house administrative components and a data center, according to the filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, and is being built by Turner Construction Co.
Microsoft’s SAT80-1 and SAT80-2 data centers are under construction on 206 rural acres at Potranco Road and FM 471 near Castroville.
Each building is more than 106,000 square feet and the property will feature vehicle entry gates, a pedestrian turnstile, a security guardhouse and a new monument sign. The contractor is Bartlett Cocke.
In addition to those new centers, Microsoft has built at least seven others in San Antonio and one in Medina County in the past eight years. The first of those were two centers built in 2015 at $90 million each.
In 2021, Amazon Web Services also filed plans with the state for three 109,000-square-foot data centers on the far West Side totaling $112 million in construction costs.
