Report: Microsoft to Build Huge Texas Data Center Campus

Microsoft has bought property in Texas where it plans to build a massive data center campus over the course of five years.

As it continues to grow its cloud services business, Microsoft has been expanding the data center capacity to support those services around the world at a rapid pace. Global data center construction has been viewed as an expensive arms race with its chief competitor in cloud, Amazon Web Services, as companies spend billions of dollars to improve the quality of their services to users and increase the amount of locations where they can store their data and virtual infrastructure.

Microsoft announced a multi-site expansion initiative in Europe last month, and in September said it had launched three cloud data centers in India. Amazon in November announced it was preparing to bring online cloud data centers in the UK and South Korea.

News of Microsoft’s land acquisition in San Antonio was reported by the San Antonio Business Journal Thursday. The report cited officials of the Texas Research and Technology Foundation, which controls the Texas Research Park where the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant bought 158 acres of land.

The company plans to build an eight-data center campus on the property in four phases, expecting to break ground on phase one in January. The development will total 1.2 to 1.3 million square feet, TRTF president York Duncan told the Business Journal.

In addition to building data centers Microsoft – like all other web-scale data center operators – also leases space from data center providers. Microsoft is the single largest tenant of the wholesale data center provider DuPont Fabros Technology, contributing more than one fifth of the provider’s total annual rent revenue.