In Castroville, west of San Antonio, technology giant Microsoft Corp. is turning swaths of empty farmland into sprawling data centers . In the Hill Country, east of that project, two data centers are set to rise on a country road near San Marcos .
A flurry of the power-hungry facilities are under construction in and around San Antonio and Austin, which lead the U.S. in the growth of so-called colocation data centers over the past five years, according to a new report by JLL . With colocation facilities, businesses rent space for their equipment rather than building and managing their own data centers.
The size of the San Antonio-Austin market — measured in terms of the power the data centers consume — has quadrupled since 2020, according to the commercial real estate services firm…