When Suzanne and Anthony Stinson married in 1980, they moved to a pioneer-built house outside of Castroville and raised their children on land that had been in his family since the 1840s.
Back then, “it was all country out that way. You’d have to sit there for a while before a car would go by,” she said.
But after neighbors sold their land to Microsoft for what the Stinsons say was tens of thousands of dollars an acre, the couple now copes with dust and noise coming from the adjacent site where a data center has been under construction since 2022. The contractor put up plastic sheeting, at their request, and the couple planted a row of trees.
“It’s sad because they’re taking out agricultural production for cloud space, for computer data,” she said. “You just wonder, why do we need all this?”
In a county known more for farms that yield corn, cotton and hay than high-tech server farms, Microsoft is doubling down on the already massive data center.
As the construction site expands, so does the number of such facilities in rural Medina County forcing residents there to reckon with a kind of growth they never expected.
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Microsoft owns at least 12 parcels of land in Medina County, according to tax records. Many are contiguous parcels and all are located in the eastern part of the county.
The combination of cheap, available land and abundant energy resources is attracting companies like Microsoft to build data centers in the county, said Medina County Judge Keith Lutz.
SAT82 also qualified for a 15-year, 80% property tax abatement from the county, he said. Even with the tax abatement, data centers can generate revenue that’s equivalent in property taxes to almost 900 residential rooftops, Lutz added.
The state also offers tax breaks to qualifying data centers, including a temporary sales tax exemption and other incentives.
Officials welcome the development of giant server farms in the face of a population boom in the county.
“We have a tremendous amount of growth going on in this county — people growth — and with that growth comes a lot of challenges, lots of infrastructure [needs] … that we’re going to have to accomplish that are way bigger than just what the county citizens can handle,” Lutz said.
Medina County has a population of about 51,000, according to the 2022 American Community Survey. In the dozen years leading up to that survey, the county’s population increased 11 out of 12 years, with an average annual growth rate of 1.3%.
The largest annual population increase was 2.7% between 2020 and 2021, and the following year, the population grew again by 1.93%.
This influx is occurring in a county where there are 2,200 farms still family-owned, according to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture, and 2020 census data shows 84% of the population resides in a rural area.
“Sheer panic” is how Castroville Mayor Darrin Schroeder described the city’s reaction to the approaching sprawl from San Antonio and the development that’s occurring as landowners sell off their farms.
“We’ve had this influx of growth,” he said of residential and commercial projects already in progress in the city and adjacent to its borders. “The current development agreements have tripled the size of the city [and that’s] just with the ones that we’ve already nailed down. And we still have many more to go.”
I’ve talked a bit about Medina County, which has been on my radar as a small-but-growing red county next to a large blue urban county. Medina voted 69% for Trump in 2020, though that represented just under 23K total votes. But places like Medina, and there are a lot of them, go a long way towards cancelling out the Democratic growth in the big urban areas. We have to pay attention to them and figure out a strategy for blunting their impact.
Reading this story made me think about the recent cryptomining noise articles. Like this, the building boom was taking place in a small, dark red, exurban county, whose residents were none too pleased with the changes. The big difference is that the data centers are actually useful, and as this story noted Microsoft is actually a pretty good steward of energy resources and the environment. Opposing the cryptominers is both a political opportunity for Democrats and objectively beneficial, while opposing the data centers feels to me like NIMBYism to no good end.
That said, while wannabe legislators and statewide Dems could get involved against the cryptominers, it’s candidates for local office in Medina County who might explore ways to soften the blow of data center expansion in their neighborhoods. A path forward is less obvious to me, but I have no doubt something worthwhile exists. I’m just putting it out there as something to think about. I’ve no doubt other counties like Medina are facing similar issues.