The Data Centres the City’s Permit Record Misses
San Antonio’s building-permit file is the best public record of data centre construction in the city, and it stops at the city’s own jurisdiction. This page checks it against a record that does not: the federal environmental register, where a facility appears because somebody filed a state or federal permit for it.
The City of San Antonio's building-permit record stops at the City's own jurisdiction, and it does not reach every place a data centre is built. This page asks a different question: where does a state or federal environmental permit say a facility exists, and does the City's permit file contain it? Every place here is in the US EPA, Facility Registry Service (ECHO) because somebody filed a construction stormwater notice or a Clean Air Act authorisation for it.
Places the City building-permit record does not contain
These are the ones worth looking at. A permit was filed with the state or the federal government, and the City's own building-permit file has nothing within 400 metres of that point.
| Facility, as the register names it | Where | County | Records | Air | Nearest permit site |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPS ENERGY - CYRUS ONE SUBSTATION 8 other names in the register at this place | 14719 OMICRON DR | Bexar | 9 | 0 | 7,924 m |
| MICROSOFT SAT 11 & 12 2 other names in the register at this place | 15000 BLOCK OF LAMBDA DRIVE | Bexar | 3 | 0 | 9,188 m |
| LOWES DATA CENTER 1 other name in the register at this place | 10045 ROGERS RUN | Bexar | 2 | 0 | 702 m |
| AMAZON DATA CENTER SH 211 | SE OF TX-211 AND LAMBDA DR described, not addressed | Bexar | 1 | 0 | 7,644 m |
| MICROSOFT SAT 8990 DATA CENTER PROJECT SITE | NORTH OF HWY 90, AND SOUTH OF COUNTY RD 4516 described, not addressed | Medina | 1 | 0 | 24,300 m |
| CYRUSONE SAT | ON THE EAST SIDE OF PORTULA BLVD APPROX. 0.10 MILE described, not addressed | Bexar | 1 | 0 | 1,238 m |
| CYRUSONE SAT 14 | SITE IS LOCATED APPROXIMATELY 3 MILES WEST OF THE described, not addressed | Medina | 1 | 0 | 25,508 m |
| CYRUSONE TRP - CPS UNDERGROUND DESIGN ASSISTANCE | ALONG OMICRON DRIVE AND LAMBDA DRIVE described, not addressed | Bexar | 1 | 0 | 8,068 m |
| MICROSOFT SAT CAMPUS SAT09 13 40 46 | 15434 LAMBDA DR | Bexar | 1 | 1 | 6,762 m |
| MICROSOFT SAT15 | 3555 WESTOVER LINK | Bexar | 1 | 1 | 1,133 m |
Places both records contain
Published so the overlap can be checked rather than taken on trust. Each of these is within 400 metres of a site on the City-permit page, and the address that page uses is given beside it.
| Facility, as the register names it | The permit page's address for it | Metres apart | Records |
|---|---|---|---|
| Already published MICROSOFT | 5207 ROGERS RD, City of San Antonio, TX 78251 | 175 | 9 |
| Already published EX WEST GREEN DATA CENTER | 1050 DEMOCRACY, City of San Antonio, TX 78251 | 43 | 2 |
| Already published AWS - ALE 61 | 12807 DONOP RD, City of San Antonio, TX 78223 | 57 | 2 |
| Already published AMAZON WEB SERVICE DATA CENTER | 1511 NW CROSSROADS, City of San Antonio, TX 78251 | 108 | 1 |
| Already published MICROSOFT GREEN DATA CENTER | 8535 POTRANCO RD, City of San Antonio, TX 78251 | 27 | 1 |
| Already published STREAM DATACENTER | 11203 W MILITARY DR, City of San Antonio, TX 78253 | 306 | 1 |
Why this is not an inventory
- This is not a count of data centres, and it must never be added to the site count on the city-permit tool. Many of these places are places that tool already publishes, and the overlap is stated beside every figure here.
- A row in this register is a permit event, not a building. One campus files a stormwater notice, an air authorisation and a separate notice for its electrical substation, and each is its own row. Records within 400 metres of one another are grouped into one place for that reason, and the number of records behind each place is published.
- A construction stormwater notice means somebody told the state they were about to disturb ground. It does not prove a building exists, is finished, or is running, exactly as a building permit does not.
- The active flag is the register's own and a blank is not the same as "closed". Both counts are given rather than filtering on it.
- Most locations in this register are not addresses. The filer often describes where the site is, such as "NW OF OMICRON DR & THETA DR", so a place cannot always be tied to a parcel. Everything here is grouped and mapped by coordinate instead, and the number of narrative locations is published.
- The county written on a filing is not reliable: one Amazon facility on Marbach Lane, which is in Bexar County, is filed under Comal. County here is derived from the coordinates instead.
- Nothing in this register says how much electricity or water any of these places uses, how big it is, or what it cost. Those figures are not in this record and this page does not estimate them.
- A facility is only here if somebody searched for its name. The names searched are published with their counts, including the zeroes, and an operator nobody thought of is invisible exactly as it is on the permit tool.
What was searched
A facility is only here if somebody searched for its name, so the names are published with their counts including the zeroes. Searched and found nothing is a different statement from never looked. Found nothing in this area: qts sat, h5 data, digital realty, equinix, cloudhq, stack infra, aligned data, rowan digital, edgeconnex, compass data, t5 data, tierpoint, databank, frontier data. Four names were tested and refused because they match things that are not data centres: "tract" returns Toepperwein Tract, McCrary Tract Subdivision and Tractor Supply; "rowan" returns six private individuals and a pool company; "uniti" matches the word communities; and "amazon" returns 236 Texas records, 31 of them here, which are delivery stations, a pharmacy, a sortation centre and a grid wall. That company's other name, "aws", is searched: it returns three records in the whole state and two of them are the same real data centre.
Study area: San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan statistical area (Atascosa, Bandera, Bexar, Comal, Guadalupe, Kendall, Medina, Wilson), a published federal boundary rather than a rectangle drawn for this page. County comes from each facility's coordinates, never from the county name written on the filing, because that field is wrong on real records. Register retrieved 2026-08-29. Machine-readable at /api/v1/dc-corroboration.
How the gap was found
Not by looking for missing data centres. By testing a list of claims.
The companion page, San Antonio data centres 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 metres.
What this page is not
The one number on it that would be wrong is a number nobody printed.
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 metres 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.
Medina County publishes nothing
Two of the largest campuses in the region are outside every record that can be queried.
Castroville, in Medina County, carries two data centre 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.
Use the data
Everything on this page is available as JSON and CSV, with no key and no signup.
/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 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.
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.
- Data Centers: The anchor of this set, data centre 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 Environmental Record: What federal regulators hold about the same facilities, found by industrial classification code rather than operator name. Registrations only: no figure for electricity, water, jobs or the grid.
Other San Antonio tools
Same method, a different public record. Each one states what its record cannot answer.
Crime Map Building Permits Bar & Restaurant Revenue Aggressive Driving Trail Accessibility Licence Plate Readers Data Centers Data Center Zoning 311 Response Times Data Center Corroboration Data Center Environmental Record Bond Projects
All 12 are free, with no signup and no email wall, and the public API behind them needs no key.