The Data Centers the City’s Permit Record Misses

The companion page, San Antonio data centers from the City permit record, publishes sites found by searching the City’s own building permits. Thirty-one specific facility addresses, taken from an industry list, were tested against that record. Eight were already published. Fourteen had no permit at that address at any building number.

The addresses that returned nothing were not random. They cluster on two streets: Omicron Drive and Lambda Drive, in the Texas Research Park. Searching the permit file for those street names returns a handful of records and none at the building numbers claimed. The streets are in the City’s record. The buildings are not.

That is the shape of a jurisdiction boundary, not a data-quality problem, and this page tests it. Every place listed above holds a construction stormwater notice or a Clean Air Act authorisation filed with the state or the federal government. The City’s building-permit file, searched at the same coordinates, has nothing within four hundred meters.

These places cannot be added to the site count on the permit page. Several of them are the same places. They are matched by distance rather than by address text, because most locations in this register are not addresses at all: a filer writes “NW of Omicron Dr & Theta Dr” or “site is located approximately 3 mi north of Highway 90”, and no address comparison can resolve that to a parcel. Every row on this page carries its distance to the nearest site on the permit page, so the overlap can be checked rather than believed.

A row in this register is also a permit event, not a building. One campus files a stormwater notice for the site, an air authorisation for its generators, and a separate notice for the electrical substation that feeds it. Records within four hundred meters of one another are grouped into one place for that reason, and the number of records behind each place is published beside it.

And a construction stormwater notice is not a building. It means somebody told the state they were about to disturb ground, exactly as a building permit means somebody asked for permission. Neither proves anything was built, finished, or is running.

Castroville, in Medina County, carries two data center campuses in the federal register. Medina County itself publishes no machine-readable permit data: no open-data portal, and no mapping service that answers. The county’s own records exist, but they cannot be queried, compared or archived by anybody who is not standing at the counter. So for those two campuses the federal environmental register is not a second source. It is the only one.

Bexar County is the opposite case, and it took until August 2026 to notice. Bexar publishes a storm water site development permit register of 3,150 permits, issued by the county to satisfy the state discharge permit that any project disturbing an acre of ground needs. It is queryable, it carries coordinates, and it reaches ground the City’s building-permit file never will.

It is also close to invisible. Bexar County runs two data surfaces. The one a search engine finds, the county’s open-data portal, lists twenty-two datasets: boundaries, precincts, census geography, libraries, a set of 1890s historic layers. No permits. Reading it, the honest conclusion is that the county publishes nothing worth querying. The county’s own mapping server, on a different hostname, carries roughly forty more services including this permit register, the sheriff’s incident log and a capital-projects file that names contractors and construction costs. The catalog is blind to what the server holds. That is worth stating plainly, because the same mistake is available in every county in Texas.

Searched with the same operator vocabulary the City permit page uses, re-measured against this register rather than inherited because a keyword that is safe in one record is a trap in another, the county register returns 15 permits at 6 places. 27 operator names were searched and 20 of them returned nothing at all, which is published for the same reason the sibling tools publish theirs: an operator searched for and not found is a different claim from an operator nobody looked for. A codename rule that would have caught more was tested and refused, because it also caught a Google Fiber hut that sits close enough to a data center campus for proximity to have confirmed it.

3 of those places appear in no other register on this platform, and two of them are the reason the county tier had to exist at all: they sit outside San Antonio, in Helotes and in Fair Oaks Ranch, where the City has no permitting authority and nothing to file. The federal register does not hold them either. Until this register was read, they were not in any record here.

The register also demonstrates, on its own rows, why the county on a filing cannot be trusted. One of these permits is filed under Boerne, which is the seat of Kendall County. Its coordinate is in Bexar. That is the same defect that put an Amazon facility on Marbach Lane, which is in Bexar, under Comal in the federal register: two independent records, the same failure, which is why county here is always derived from the coordinate and never read off the form.

/api/v1/dc-corroboration serves the places, the gaps, the names searched including the ones that found nothing, and a quality endpoint that returns is_a_count_of_data_centres: false deliberately. The overlap with the permit record rides on every response and on an HTTP header, so a consumer that reads only the totals still cannot add the two together by accident.

The Bexar County permit tier is a separate file, because it is a separate register with its own provenance: sa-dc-county.json y sa-dc-county.csv. Both carry, on every row, the distance to the nearest City-permit site and to the nearest federal-register place, so the three records cannot be summed by accident.

The study area is the San Antonio–New Braunfels metropolitan statistical area, a published federal boundary, chosen so that the count does not move when somebody redraws a rectangle. County comes from each facility’s coordinates rather than the county name written on its filing, because that field is wrong on real records: one Amazon facility on Marbach Lane, which is in Bexar County, is filed under Comal.