Tempers flared during a late May public hearing about whether San Antonio residents wanted another data center in their far West Side neighborhood.
“There are already three data centers in my backyard,” one middle-aged woman railed during her time at the podium. “Now the light is in my bedroom every night. I don’t sleep. I listen to the hum of the air conditioners.”
A man with long hair and glasses looked directly at executives with the company operating the new center as he delivered his stinging message of disapproval.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for, because there is a special place in hell for all of you,” he said.
Held May 28 in a Marriott ballroom near Sea World — and right across from the data center in question — the hearing mirrored debates playing out in communities nationwide. Amid a boom in data centers, residents are pushing back against the operations, their use of public resources and their impacts on daily life.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) held the meeting to gather input on the pending approval of an air-quality permit for the new Westover Hills facility, developed and run by Denver-based Vantage Data Centers.
This was the first public hearing on the center, located at 5207 Rogers Road, which is already constructed and partly operational, company officials told the crowd.
The center spans 360,000 square feet and rises three stories tall. It cost an estimated $157 million to construct, according to pre-build projections on Vantage’s website. The building provides data processing and server hosting for a number of confidential “hyperscaler” clients, or large cloud-computing providers that build and manage global networks.
Though the hearing was convened to discuss Vantage’s air-permit application, it quickly became a public airing of grievances for an array of concerns around AI and data centers writ large.
Dozens of angry residents lined up behind the podium to ask why this was the first public hearing for a center that’s already “partly operational.”
Westover Hills residents complained during comments that they woke up one morning and trees in a once-forested area had been cleared for the new construction. Others asked what the facility was for, whether it was for AI and whether it would benefit the surrounding community in any way.
Vantage representatives said the company’s list of clients is confidential, but digital infrastructure giants, often referred to as a “hyperscalers,” who regularly use data centers include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google Cloud, IBM, Apple and others.
“Do you feel like you’re taking advantage of our community right now by attempting this while we have these loose regulations?” a young woman asked Vantage representatives during the town hall.
Michael Duplantis, the company’s vice president of environmental health and safety, responded.
“I’ll answer the question directly,” he said. “No, we don’t feel like we’re taking advantage of you.”
However, as concerns rise about the drain data centers place on resources and the paucity of jobs they create for local residents, public resistance is growing nationwide.
Residents who attended the San Antonio hearing peppered the Vantage executives with questions about the site’s water and power usage, including how they cool their racks of heavy-duty computers.
A Vantage representative said the center’s cooling method would be closed-loop, utilizing a glycolic liquid, and so water usage would be “virtually zero.”
Murky disclosure
Data center operators aren’t legally required to answer detailed questions about their water usage or the methods used to cool their computers. Instead, the companies typically treat that information as proprietary.
Environmental advocates argue that kind of opacity is harming Vantage’s introduction to an already hostile community.
Adrian Shelley, Texas director for advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, said the company’s projection of “virtually zero” water usage at the new San Antonio site doesn’t account for what he called the “water hungry” gas plant powering the facility.
Shelley said the data center appears as less of a resource draw and pollution source on paper thanks to a regulatory loophole that treats the collocated gas plant powering it — operated by Houston-based company VoltaGrid — as a separate facility.
Therefore, at face value, the data center itself is categorized as a “minor New Source Review,” under Clean Air Act compliance standards — or a commercial facility whose potential air emissions fall below the thresholds that could cause it to be considered a major pollution source.
Shelley also argued that closed-loop cooling systems use considerably more energy than those using the water-intensive evaporative method.
In addition to the collocated gas plant powering the new facility and one other Vantage data center on Omicron Drive, the data centers also will rely on backup diesel generators for power in the event of emergencies such as a severe storm-induced power outage.
The Rogers Road data center has 65 backup diesel generators and the nearby Vantage site on Omicron Drive has 86.
Residents raised concerns about the potential health hazards of burning diesel regularly in their backyard. They requested clarity on what Vantage considers an emergency situation.
Once again, Vantage representatives demurred on the details but said the generators would only be used in an “actual emergency,” not just to counteract power-rate fluctuations.
Environmental advocates at last month’s meeting noted that the new Vantage data center is located next to Aspire Allergy & Sinus Center along with assisted living facilities, a major hospital, a community college, two residential subdivisions, apartment complexes and two hotels, including the Marriott.
In other words, the site is located inside a high concentration of people, including some who already have respiratory sensitivities to air pollutants.
In an interview with the Current, Rachel Hanes, policy manager for the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance (GEAA) noted that diesel generators at the new center would release volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, various particulate matters and other hazardous air pollutants.
Those pollutants are linked to a multitude of adverse health impacts, such as heart and lung disease, respiratory mortality, developmental problems and different types of cancer, she added.
San Antonio-Austin boom
The mounting concerns about the Vantage site come as the San Antonio area is already awash in data centers. Fifteen are clustered in District 6, where the new data center is located — and dozens more are spread throughout the city, according to Councilman Ric Galvan, who represents the district.
Indeed, the San Antonio-Austin corridor is experiencing the nation’s most rapid growth in data centers, according to environmental experts.
During the Vantage hearing, Shelley and other advocates spoke from the podium about the unknown cumulative effects of concentrating so many of the centers in one area.
“There’s not really any mechanism at the state level to address cumulative impacts,” Shelley told the Current. “This has been a point of contention with us in the regulation of air and water pollution for a long time: that they look at these facilities in isolation.”
Hanes told the Current that part of the difficulty in overseeing the industry is the opaque nature of their operations and the fact that each data center is different.
“I really think the data center operators are not doing themselves a service by not releasing information and being transparent,” Hanes said. “And so it seems to people that they’re just getting run roughshod over.”
During the hearing, a resident pointed out that the data center abuts a creek and queried whether the body of water would become a dump site. Data centers are known to produce wastewater that may contain PFOS, a toxic “forever chemical” linked to contamination of waterways.
Vantage execs insisted the center would generate zero wastewater.
However, Hanes questioned whether Vantage representatives were being truthful when they said the new operation will have minimal environmental impact.
“I still find it interesting that they are not discharging any wastewater, which could be true, but that doesn’t quite make sense to me,” Hanes said.
To dump wastewater in the nearby creek, the facility would need to obtain a Texas Pollution Discharge Elimination System (TPDES) permit from the state, otherwise known as a wastewater permit.
However, Vantage representatives at the hearing said the center would also be connected to the city’s sewage system.
If any wastewater is released from the center, it would likely enter city sewers, where it would be handled by a San Antonio Water System wastewater treatment plant.
“Wastewater can contain heavy metals, corrosion inhibitors, salts, minerals and … potential forever chemicals,” Hanes said. “So, we don’t know exactly what’s in that wastewater. Hopefully SAWS would have that answer. But if they happen to contain those existing contaminants … that’s obviously a concern.”
Vantage has been evasive about how many times the glycolic fluid can be recycled through the facility’s closed-loop cooling system and how much water will be needed to supply both the data center and the VoltaGrid gas plant, among other questions, she added.
Hanes said she witnessed an official from another data center operator admit during a Texas House State Affairs hearing that its site switched to an evaporative method from closed loop depending on the temperature.
“When it is really hot outside, there becomes a point where the closed loop system is no longer as efficient and it becomes more efficient for them to switch over to evaporative,” Hanes said.
However, she added that she doesn’t know what that temperature threshold is, or even whether the Vantage data center might operate the same way.
Regulatory blindspot
Data center operators are keeping GEAA and other environmental groups in the dark as they attempt to educate lawmakers and the public, Hanes complained.
“When each data center is different or potentially different, and when details are not available to the public, it makes, of course, our lives and our attempts to provide recommendations and insight much more difficult,” she said.
Also raising concern, neither Texas’ current water-usage plan nor an adopted 2027 plan account for data centers’ consumption. And though the previous session of the Texas Legislature separately addressed the growing water crisis in drought-stricken Texas, lawmakers presented no bills specifically addressing data center water usage, advocates caution.
However, given the growing bipartisan public outcry against data centers throughout Texas, Hanes is hopeful that will change with the next session, which starts in January. To that end, the GEAA is working directly with lawmakers to draft meaningful legislation and address this regulatory blindspot at the state level.
At the local level, Councilman Galvan submitted a proposal last fall calling for a comprehensive discussion on the data center industry’s impacts on the city.
In a conversation with the Current, he pointed out that since the area where Vantage built is zoned for the appropriate commercial use, the company needed no city permission to open the facility.
“Data centers are vital to our digital life and economy, but their growth has far outpaced public policy,” Galvan wrote when he submitted his proposal, which still requires more hearings before it faces a vote by the full council. “We must understand how the recent and rapid data center expansion affects our electric grid, water supply and neighborhoods — and ensure San Antonio is planning responsibly for the future.”
However, Public Citizen’s Shelley said that Galvan’s proposal doesn’t go far enough to stop data centers before they are built — or to regulate those already operating here.
“[It’s] mostly about data gathering. You know, getting more of an understanding of how this industry is impacting the state or the city,” he said. “It’s not a proposal to regulate. So while I think it’s a great first step, I do not think it goes far enough. And I think the city is going to need to go further.”
Unlike many cities, San Antonio owns the public utilities supplying such facilities. Shelley wondered whether officials at SAWS and City Public Service could reject a commercial use application if it’s determined to be against the public’s interest.
Galvan said that while it is unknown how many jobs the data center would bring to the area, that number is under 20 for a facility representing an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. That, coupled with the job losses caused by AI, makes this a labor issue as well as a health and environmental one, Galvan said.
“There’s a shared concern about how negatively our workforce is going to be impacted by this,” Galvan said, adding that even his Republican colleague Misty Spears has proposed a CCR about preparing the workforce for the negative impacts of AI.
Also, Galvan added, such centers often bring in specialists to perform specific technical tasks at the data center, meaning locals might not get hired for many of those jobs, other than the temporary construction work to build the center.
Given the little recourse state and local officials currently have to stop such facilities, Hanes projected that Texas will become the epicenter of a data center gold rush. Developers are likely to move quickly to build over the next few months so they can be grandfathered in ahead of impending regulations, she predicted.
There’s no real hope of stopping the new Vantage data center from becoming fully operational, Shelley said. All that remains is some customary paperwork, he said, which is bound to be rubber stamped by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a state agency environmentalists have long complained is in the back pocket of big business.
Meanwhile, San Antonio residents can only raise their voices in opposition, joining with those of countless other communities nationwide.
“People feel like they’re not being heard,” Shelley said. “They feel like they’re being actively silenced. These are just administrative exercises. They’re boxes to be checked in order to satisfy federal permitting requirements. And from that perspective, the entire process is a sham, and it’s meaningless.”
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
