What Environmental Regulators Hold About San Antonio’s Data Centers
El building permit tool on this site refuses, in words, to answer the questions people actually ask about data centers. No figure for electricity. No figure for water. Nothing about jobs, cooling, generators or the grid. That refusal is correct, and it stands: the City permit file has no answer to any of them.
This page asks whether any other government record does. It publishes what federal environmental regulators already hold about the same facilities, and it publishes the gaps with equal weight. Nothing here is modeled and nothing is estimated.
This is not a count of data centers, and nothing on this page is a power figure. It counts 8 federal registrations carrying a data-center classification in the San Antonio metro. Some of those are places the building permit tool already publishes and some are places the corroboration tool already publishes. Adding any two of the three totals counts the same buildings twice.
There is no megawatt figure, no water figure and no jobs figure anywhere on this page, because no machine readable government record carries one for these facilities. Nothing here is estimated from floor area or from anything else.
The City has no category for a data center. The federal register does.
The whole argument of the building permit tool is that the City record carries no occupancy type, no use code and no flag identifying a data center, so the only handle is free text somebody typed into a project name. The federal environmental register is different: it classifies facilities by NAICS code, and two of those codes describe this industry directly.
Searching by classification is not the same as searching by name, and that is the point. A keyword list is our judgement about which companies to look for. A NAICS code is the regulator’s judgement about what a facility is. Three of the addresses below were tested against the City permit record in August and returned no permits at any building number; the classification reaches them anyway.
Where these facilities are
8 of 8 classified facilities are on this map. Color separates the ones holding a Title V major-source air permit from the ones that do not. Major source is a statement about how much the permitted equipment could emit if it ran to its limit, not a measurement of anything that has run, and this page publishes no figure for electricity, water or emissions because no government record holds one.
Several of these positions come from a described location rather than a street address, because that is how the federal register records them. A point is where a regulator says a filing is, not the outline of a building.
Nothing external is contacted until you press this: not the map library and not the background tiles.
Every classified facility, and what each sibling record says about it
Two independent verdicts travel with every row, because a gap in one record is not a gap in the other. The address test runs first where the register carries a street address, and distance is the fallback only where it does not.
| Facility as the register names it | Address | Air permit | What the City permit record says |
|---|---|---|---|
| EX WEST GREEN DATA CENTER | THE SE CORNER OF SENTRY GATEWAY AND WEST MILITARY | none in the register | no street address in the register; a permit site is within 400 m |
| MICROSOFT | 5120 ROGERS RD | Title V, major source | a different address on the same street, 196 m away |
| MICROSOFT SAT CAMPUS SAT09 13 40 46 | 15434 LAMBDA DR | Title V, major source | no City permit site within 400 m |
| MICROSOFT SAT15 | 3555 WESTOVER LINK | Title V, major source | the same address carries issued City permits |
| SAT2 SAT3 SAT4 | 9554 WESTOVER HILLS BLVD | Title V, major source | the same address carries issued City permits |
| STA1 | 9999 WESTOVER HILLS BLVD | Title V, major source | no City permit site within 400 m |
| VANTAGE DATA CENTER TX2 | 5207 ROGERS RD | Title V, major source | the same address carries issued City permits |
| VANTAGE TX11 | 14720 OMICRON DR | Title V, major source | no City permit site within 400 m |
Highlighted rows are the ones with a street address, no matching address in the City permit record, and no permit site within 400 meters. One row is deliberately not highlighted despite being a near miss: a facility registered at 5120 Rogers Rd sits 196 meters from a permit site at 5150 Rogers Rd. Those are two different house numbers on one street, and the permit tool never normalises a house number, so the evidence does not settle whether they are one place. It is reported as unsettled rather than counted either way.
Major sources that report no emissions
Those two numbers are not a contradiction, and this page will not present them as one. A Title V major source classification describes the potential to emit criteria pollutants if the equipment ran to its permitted limit. The greenhouse gas program records actual reported carbon dioxide equivalent against a separate threshold. Different pollutants, different tests. A facility can cross the first and sit under the second with nothing inconsistent about it.
What the pair does support is narrower, and it is the reason this page exists: the standby equipment at these sites is large enough to be regulated as a major source, and the federal record contains no evidence that it runs much. Neither statement is a measure of how much electricity a data center uses. Standby generators are what run when the grid fails.
What no government record will tell you
Each of these was checked on 2026-09-13, and the negative result is published rather than filled in.
| The question people ask | Lo que dice el registro |
|---|---|
| How many megawatts? | Nothing machine readable. Engine capacity appears in TCEQ permit documents as PDF only, and a search of the state open data catalog returns other jurisdictions’ portals rather than Texas air permits. The air permit number is published in the table above so a reader can retrieve the document instead of taking an estimate from us. |
| How much water? | Nothing. The San Antonio Water System publishes no machine readable consumption data; its open data portal returns no datasets, and the City GIS layers carrying its name are outages, hydrants and distribution sites. |
| How many jobs? | No government record found. Not estimated. |
| How much cooling? | No government record found. Not estimated. |
| What did they actually emit? | One of the 8 facilities has a National Emissions Inventory record at all, and the federal Envirofacts service exposes no facility level table for it. |
| How big is the substation? | The City GIS substation layer returns no queryable fields and no feature count. The register does record that utility substation construction was filed in the data center cluster, but a substation is provisioned headroom and serves a network, not one customer, so this page reports the filing and never what it powers. |
Why there is no estimate here
The obvious way to answer the power question is to take a recorded floor area and multiply it by a published watts per square foot figure. It would produce a number. It is refused, for a reason that is worth stating plainly.
The only floor area in the permit record is the largest single permit’s stamped area at a site, and that figure exists in the first place because the same area is repeated across sibling permits for one project. At a site carrying more than a hundred permits it is a floor of unknown tightness. Multiplying it by a density we choose produces a result whose precision is entirely our own assumption, and publishing that beside figures taken from government records would make the two indistinguishable to a reader. A range would not fix it. It would only show how wide our uncertainty is while still putting a megawatt number on the page.
The federal classification is not tidy either, and that is published rather than smoothed: one facility here carries a manufacturing NAICS code alongside its data center code, from two different federal systems. A facility with no Title V permit is likewise not a facility with no generators. It is one the register does not classify as a major source, which can mean smaller equipment, a different permit type, or a filing this search did not reach.
Source: United States Environmental Protection Agency facility register, retrieved 2026-09-13. Study area is the San Antonio and New Braunfels metropolitan statistical area, a published federal boundary. County comes from each facility’s coordinates, never from the county string on the filing. Machine readable copies: JSON API y CSV.
Share it with someone asking what these use.
The rest of this investigation
Four pages read four different public records to ask four different questions about the same buildings. A place can appear in two of these records and still be one building, so no figure on any of them can be added to a figure on another.
- Centros de datos: The anchor of this set, data center sites found in the City of San Antonio’s own building-permit file, published with the candidates that were rejected and why each one failed.
- Data Center Zoning: How much land would still be eligible, under the rules Council votes on in October, by council district. It measures acres, not buildings, and scores a proposal that has not been adopted.
- Data Center Corroboration: Places the federal environmental register and the Bexar County permit register record where the City permit file has nothing, corroboration of where the City record stops, not an inventory. Two registers over overlapping ground: the counts must never be added.
Otras herramientas de San Antonio
El mismo método, un registro público diferente. Cada uno de ellos indica lo que su registro no puede responder.
Mapa de la delincuencia Permisos de construcción Ingresos del bar y el restaurante Conducción agresiva Trail Accessibility Lectores de matrículas Centros de datos Data Center Zoning 311 Response Times Data Center Corroboration Data Center Environmental Record Proyectos de bonos Búsqueda de distritos del Consejo Tiempos de respuesta de la oficina del sheriff Proyectos de infraestructura del condado Tiempos de respuesta de la policía Registros de niños desaparecidos Personas desaparecidas
Los 18 son gratuitos, sin necesidad de registrarse ni de proporcionar su correo electrónico, y el API pública Lo que hay detrás de ellos no necesita llave.
¿Quién publica esto?
These tools are built and maintained by BrandShyp LLC, a San Antonio software firm. We sell datos, software y trabajo en materia de accesibilidad a organismos públicos y estamos buscando contratos con los gobiernos estatales y locales. Se encuentra en trámite la certificación como pequeña empresa ante la Agencia Regional de Certificación del Centro-Sur de Texas. No contamos con ningún contrato con la ciudad de San Antonio.
Ningún cliente, agencia o patrocinador financia, revisa ni aprueba ninguna de estas herramientas, y nada de lo que aparece en estas páginas constituye una solicitud de negocio. Todas las cifras provienen del registro público que se indica a continuación, al cual se incluye un enlace y que puede consultarse sin nuestra intervención.
Correcciones. Si alguna cifra aquí no concuerda con el expediente, escriba al juez Harker a [email protected] junto con la cifra y la fuente que la contradice. Las correcciones se realizan en la página misma, y los cambios se indican allí, en lugar de sustituirse de manera silenciosa.
Fuente. This page reads the US Environmental Protection Agency ECHO register, searched by industrial classification code rather than by operator name. The record is linked from the page above and can be queried without us. We claim no rights over the underlying record and add no license of our own to it.