San Antonio Data Centers

Read this first. The City's permit record has no category for a data centre: no occupancy type, no use code, no flag. The only handle is a free-text project name somebody typed. 17 sites is therefore a floor, not a count, because the largest projects in this record are permitted under codenames that say nothing about what the building is.

Where they are

17 sites is few enough that every coordinate on this map was checked individually, which is not a luxury the whole permit file allows.

5 of the 17 sit within 1,200 metres of each other, which is why their labels overlap and some are dropped. The table above is the authoritative list.

What it took to place these dots. The two coordinate columns hold two different systems at once: 197 permits at these sites give a position in degrees and 481 give it in Texas survey feet. Converted, the two agree to within 251.3 metres, so neither is wrong: the record is simply inconsistent, and anything that plots the raw column without checking throws the survey-feet rows off the map. 14 of the sites carry more than one position for the same address, and the dot uses whichever the most permits agree on. One site had no coordinates under its own address spelling at all and was placed from a second spelling of the same address that does carry them. Its permit count is left as the record has it rather than merged.

The sites

Sites are found by name and then counted by address. That distinction matters: the busiest site here was discovered through 105 permits whose project name matched an operator, and actually carries 177. A name-only search under-reports it by more than half. "Largest area recorded" is the biggest single figure on any one permit, not a building size and not a total.

Why there is no total square footage on this page

One project files many permits, and the same floor area is stamped on each of them. Adding them up multiplies one building by the number of forms it generated. This is not hypothetical: it is the worst case in the City's own current file.

The right-hand column is what a naive sum produces, and every figure in it is wrong. The same reasoning applies to declared valuation, which repeats across siblings in the same way, so no total investment figure appears on this page either.

One company name, two kinds of building

Amazon holds permits in this file for data centres, filed as AWS, and for a fulfilment centre, two delivery stations, a sortation centre and a conveyor system, filed as Amazon. Every one of those addresses carries commercial permits, so the commercial-permit rule on its own would have counted all of them as data centres. The record says which is which, in the project names people typed.

A smoking shelter and vehicle charging belong to a building full of people and vans. Nothing at these addresses names a data hall, a rack, a load bank or a colo room, and all four of those appear at the AWS addresses that are counted. Which company names get this second test is measured, not assumed: an operator earns it by having at least one address in this file where the record names other building work and no data centre work. On the retrieval date exactly one operator qualified. If Amazon stopped permitting warehouses here, the next refresh would stop applying it.

What a name search catches that is not a data centre

Searching project names for an operator called Vantage also finds a residential street called Vantage Hill. Every candidate below was rejected. A site counts only if it carries at least one commercial permit, and, where one company name covers more than one kind of building here, only if the record also names data centre work at that address.

One of these is worth singling out. A permit whose project name reads "30 VANTAGE TRACE" carries the address "30 VINTAGE TRACE". The name field is not even consistent with the address on its own row, which is the clearest possible demonstration of why it cannot be the basis for a count.

Searched for and not found: Equinix, Digital Realty, STACK Infrastructure, Aligned Data Centers, Meta, EdgeConneX, CloudHQ, DataBank, Flexential, TierPoint, Iron Mountain, Data Foundry, Rackspace, T5 Data Centers, Novva, Compass Datacenters. Each was searched for by name in this file on 2026-08-29 and holds no permit in it. One name in the search does live inside another word: "aws" as a plain substring matches SAWS, the water utility, and other words containing those three letters: 879 permits at 459 address spellings in this file, many of them carrying commercial permits and so passing the first rule. Operator names like that are matched as whole words only, which is what leaves the AWS sites above and nothing else.

What this record does not contain at all

No figure for electricity. No figure for water. Nothing about jobs, cooling, generators or the grid. Those are the questions people actually ask about data centres, and the permit file has no answer to any of them. This page does not estimate them, because estimating them would mean inventing the numbers the record is missing.

A permit is also a permission, not a building: it does not prove anything was built, finished, or is running.

Take the data

Sites as CSV, the full cube as JSON. Source: City of San Antonio issued building permits, retrieved 2026-08-29, covering 505,722 permits citywide. Cite it as: City of San Antonio building permits, via brandshyp.org.