When Suzanne and Anthony Stinson married in 1980, they moved into a pioneer-built home outside Castroville and raised their children on property that had been in his family since the 1840s.
Back then, “it was all just land. You had to sit there for a while before a car came by,” she said.
But after neighbors sold their land to Microsoft for what the Stinsons say were tens of thousands of dollars an acre, the couple now has to live with dust and noise from the adjacent site, where a data center has been under construction since 2022. At their request, the developer installed plastic sheeting, and the couple planted a number of trees.
“It’s sad because they’re outsourcing agricultural production for cloud storage space and computer data,” she said. “It just makes you wonder why we need all this?”
In a county known more for its corn, cotton and hay farms than its high-tech server farms, Microsoft is doubling the capacity of its already massive data center.
As the construction site expands, so does the number of such facilities in rural Medina County, and residents there are having to deal with growth they never expected.
Located at Farm-to-Market Road 471 and Potranco Road, SAT82 will be built adjacent to 106,000 square foot SAT80-1 and SAT80-2 data centers on the same 206-acre site where construction began two years ago.
The expansion is scheduled to begin in April and will cost nearly $500 million, according to a government statement.
It follows another Microsoft data center being built on the border of Bexar and Medina counties and comes around the same time that another is planned for County Road 6712 between Lytle and Natalia.
A data center is being built just west of Castroville on US Highway 90; approximately 124 acres were cleared for this purpose, but no state building permit could be found for this site.
Where once there were dense oak forests under which cattle grazed on gentle green hills, there is now a fenced and busy construction site made of rammed earth and a bank of grey stones that appears to serve as a retaining wall.
Like SAT82, it is located on a fence with a family that raised their children and farmed and ranched in this area for years.
Large open spaces
According to tax records, Microsoft owns at least 12 properties in Medina County. Many of them are adjacent properties and all are located in the eastern part of the county.
The combination of cheap, available land and abundant energy resources attracts companies like Microsoft to build data centers in the county, said Medina County Judge Keith Lutz.
SAT82 is also eligible for a 15-year, 80% property tax abatement from the county, he said. Even with the tax abatement, data centers can generate revenue equivalent to nearly 900 rooftops in property taxes, Lutz added.
The government also offers tax breaks to qualified data centers, including a temporary exemption from sales tax and other incentives.
Given the county’s population boom, officials welcome the development of massive server farms.
“There is tremendous growth in this county – the number of people is growing – and with that growth comes a lot of challenges and a lot of infrastructure needs … that we have to deal with and that are way beyond what the citizens of the county can handle,” Lutz said.
According to the 2022 American Community Survey, Medina County has a population of about 51,000. In the 12 years prior to that survey, the county’s population increased in 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 still 2,200 family-owned farms, according to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture, and 2020 Census data shows that 84% of the population lives in a rural area.
“Pure panic” is how Castroville Mayor Darrin Schroeder described the city’s reaction to the threat of urban sprawl in San Antonio and the development that is taking place as landowners sell their farms.
“We’ve seen a tremendous growth spurt,” he said of residential and commercial projects already underway in the city and on its borders. “The current development agreements have tripled the size of the city (and that’s just with the agreements we’ve already signed). And there are many more coming up.”
The three-term mayor, who recently spoke at a Northside Chamber of Commerce event, and other officials have stepped up and hired a city planning firm to help restructure the city’s zoning plans to preserve its small-town character. Schroeder works as an IT program manager for Microsoft.
Energy and water consumption
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 large numbers of Internet users.
They are among the 5,387 data centers in the United States, most of them on the Atlantic coast, according to network services company Cloudscene. An average data center building takes up about 9,200 square meters of space.
Data centers are the most energy-intensive building type of all, accounting for two percent of total energy consumption in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Unfortunately, with the increasing demand for these services, data centers are being built everywhere,” said Kanad Ghose, a computer science professor at Binghamton University in Canada.
Ghose heads a National Science Foundation-funded research center that studies data center resource consumption. Growing dependence on electronic devices is creating demand, and artificial intelligence software is driving up power consumption “very dramatically,” he said.
He estimates that, given current trends in data center construction and electricity consumption, in five to seven years “we will surpass the total amount of 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 centers in the utility’s service area purchased approximately 31 billion gallons of potable water and 151 million gallons of recycled water.
That sounds like a lot, but according to SAWS, this consumption only represents 0.25% of the total water consumption of commercial customers.
“The commercial sector is a large, broad sector that encompasses so many different types of customers,” said Karen Guz, vice president of water conservation at SAWS, and includes schools and residential complexes. “In that context, data centers appear to have accounted for less than 1% of the volume of water sold to commercial customers in 2022 and 2023.”
When asked how much water the data center currently being built on Highway 90 will use, Bruce Alexander, director of the East Medina County Special Utility District, said the utility is currently working with Microsoft to finalize the terms of a “non-standard service agreement” for the water service.
Like many parts of the state, Medina County has been experiencing moderate to severe drought since at least 2021. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 24,500 acres of corn fields in Medina County are in drought-affected areas.
A Microsoft spokesperson responded to questions via email, saying only that Microsoft is making significant investments to expand its presence in Texas and that data centers are large and complex projects.
Legacy Land
Over the past eight years, Microsoft has built at least seven data centers in San Antonio and one in Medina County. The first two were built in 2015 for $90 million each.
Ghose said Microsoft is more concerned with conserving resources than other data center operators he studied. “I have to say, they’re actually pretty good with the environment,” he said.
The Seattle-based company uses potable water and heat exchangers that require less water for cooling, he said. Microsoft is also trying to reduce its dependence on local energy sources.
“Big companies like Microsoft have bought large tracts of land and are generating their own energy much more efficiently,” Ghose said. They often use natural gas, he added. “And in Texas, I suspect, they also use wind farms.”
Medina County resident Clay Binford still remembers the day he called and learned of Microsoft’s plans for neighboring land: 140 pristine acres along Highway 90 where he raises cattle. “It was April 28, 2022. … It wasn’t going well,” he said.
Binford is a municipal bond attorney who helps the county with economic development agreements, including the agreement approved by Medina County commissioners for the center next to the Stinsons’ property.
Since construction began this year, Binford has struggled with excessive light, dust, noise and smoke “from burning old oak trees,” he said. He is also concerned about the risk of flooding and runoff as the topography is altered during construction of the 23,000-square-foot facility.
He is so far dissatisfied with the reaction of company representatives to what he considers to be the “non-compliant use” of the property.
The property once belonged to his father, he said. “It is very important to me as an inheritance and unfortunately the future is very clouded, both literally and figuratively.”
Binford has now signed a contract to sell the property and his house. The transaction, he says, “feels like a death in the family.”
