San Antonio Ends By-Right Data Centers. Every One Now Needs a Council Vote.

San Antonio's City Council voted 9-2 on Oct. 29 to amend the city's Unified Development Code so that a new data center can no longer be built by right. Every qualifying project must now win a specific use authorization from the council itself before construction, and only in the commercial and industrial districts where the use remains allowed at all. District 6 Councilman Ric Galvan, who carried the measure, described the requirement as a standing obligation: each proposed data center comes to the council, holds a public meeting, presents a full site plan and accounts for its emergency plans.

Galvan asked city staff to begin drafting rules in October 2025, and his district holds much of the existing buildout. Council members Misty Spears and Marc Whyte cast the dissenting votes. Two competing frameworks failed 6-5 earlier in the session: a stricter package from Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones built around 1,000-foot setbacks from residential property, and a Zoning Commission version that would have preserved by-right construction in heavy industrial districts. The council also adopted an amendment letting it weigh a site's distance from the UNESCO-listed San Antonio Missions.

The rule turns on a definition adopted at the same meeting. A facility used primarily for cloud computing, artificial intelligence or high-performance computing falls under the ordinance. Telecommunications switching facilities and server rooms supporting a business's own on-site operations do not. No megawatt or square-footage threshold was attached, so a single colocation hall and a multi-building campus follow the same approval path, and a developer cannot size a project down to avoid the hearing.

For contractors, the practical change is sequence. An entitlement hearing now sits ahead of plan review, and the developer arrives at it with a full site plan, generator and emergency plans, and answers on noise, lighting, water and energy use. Electrical scope that used to be priced against a permitting calendar is now priced against a council calendar, with a public hearing where backup generation and transformer yard placement are argued before anyone pulls a permit. Design decisions that once moved quietly through plan review become part of the record a council votes on.

None of this changes the electrical work itself. The ordinance governs land use only; power service and load approval stay with CPS Energy, and water with the San Antonio Water System. Code, licensing and inspection requirements are untouched, which means the hiring consequence is one of timing rather than qualification. Projects that clear the council still need the same journey-level and master licenses, the same medium-voltage and switchgear experience, and the same commissioning support, but the start dates move and bunch. Contractors staffing San Antonio work should expect longer pre-construction windows followed by compressed field schedules once an authorization lands.

The city has not announced an effective date, and officials are still working out how the new requirement applies to applications already in review.