A fast-growing data center company from Denver has purchased two clusters of vacant land totaling 89 acres on San Antonio’s far West Side near what is already a crowded data hub.
Vantage Data Centers — a new player in the local sector — bought 31 acres on Aug. 9 at the north corner of the crossing of State Highway 151 and Wiseman Boulevard, Bexar County deed records show. The site is across Rogers Road from where Microsoft has three data centers with over 1 million square feet of space, according to the Bexar Appraisal District.
The prior owner was VHS San Antonio Partners, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., owner of the Baptist Medical Center and other local medical facilities. VHS San Antonio had owned the properties since 2007.
In late July, Vantage purchased 57.9 acres about 7 miles to the southwest, at the Texas Research Park, beside the crossing of Omicron Drive and Theta Drive, from the UT System Board of Regents, records show.
Like the Westover Hills area, Texas Research Park has spawned a cluster of data centers over the last decade. In May, the Board of Regents sold a 123.4-acre plot, immediately west of Vantage’s purchase, to CloudHQ, a data center company from Washington, D.C. Site plans indicate that the company is considering building four or five data centers there.
At the time of that sale, there were seven data centers in the area, including four run by Microsoft, according to Marty Wender, a developer who helped build the far West Side. Microsoft then had another three data centers under construction in Westover Hills, by his count.
Launched in 2010, Vantage describes itself on its website as specializing in “large-scale campuses.” It is growing fast: In 2020, it entered a $3.5 billion partnership with the investment firm Colony Capital to fund growth in North America and Europe, according to its website. The following year, it expanded into South Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
The company does not appear to have any data centers in Texas. Its website lists 11 centers in North America — ranging from Silicon Valley to Phoenix to Montreal, Canada — as well as 11 in Europe, six in Asia, one in South Africa and one in Australia. This month, the company revealed plans for a 1.7 million-square-foot campus in the Atlanta area, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
A representative of Vantage did not respond to a request for comment.
Data centers have proliferated in San Antonio in recent decades, especially on the West Side, where at least 30 have popped up, according to Wender, who helped build many of them. They now form an important part of the local economy and tax base.
“Probably within the next several years there will be 40” of the data centers, Wender told the Report in May. “And all of them on the West Side.”
The West Side has become a data hub in part due to its reliable electrical supply, with two transmission lines carrying power from different substations, Wender said. Another appeal is that the facilities can run diesel generators because the area isn’t on the recharge zone for the Edwards Aquifer.
Companies such as Stream Data Centers, which has built two data centers on the West Side, have said that San Antonio’s strong fiber infrastructure makes it a desirable city for data storage.
Data centers provide the digital storage space for cloud computing services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s OneDrive. Amazon Web Services recently built a 109,600-square-foot data center on Potranco Road near Westover Marketplace.
Some local data centers have been built for companies to use themselves, including ones by Frost Bank and Valero.
Microsoft is now working on several new data centers for San Antonio. In March, it reported to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, or TDLR, that it would spend $175.9 million to build a 153,000-square-foot data center in Texas Research Park.
It is now clearing land for a behemoth new center on Westover Link, across State Highway 151 from where Vantage bought land in Westover Hills. That facility is estimated to cost $216 million, with a completion date early next year.
Microsoft is also building a 411,000-square-foot complex known as SAT14 about a mile east on Wiseman Boulevard from Vantage’s land, as well as a $230 million center just across the boundary between Bexar and Medina counties.
All in all, Microsoft has invested over $1.2 billion over eight data center properties in the local area since 2015, according to state filings.
