Texas data center developers told state lawmakers their modern cooling systems use a fraction of the water older facilities required, but the state still lacks independent verification as 85% of Texas faces drought conditions.
When a data center campus in Abilene, Texas reported consuming minimal water last month—despite the city having allocated substantially more—it looked like proof that the industry has solved its water problem. But Abilene sits in a region under ongoing drought conditions, and the figure came from the developer itself. No independent audit confirmed it. No state agency required the disclosure. That gap between industry claims and verifiable reality is the central tension as Texas races to become a major data center hub: developers say they've dramatically cut water use, but there's almost no mechanism to prove it.
The conventional wisdom, built on years of reporting about older facilities gulping millions of gallons daily through evaporative cooling, isn't wrong exactly. It's just outdated, according to developers who have testified before state lawmakers. The stronger objection is whether the industry's self-reported numbers can be trusted without independent verification or mandatory disclosure requirements. And right now, Texas has neither.
Industry representatives have told lawmakers that modern closed-loop cooling systems have slashed water use to a fraction of what earlier designs required. Some developers claim their average data centers use less water than a handful of typical households, with facilities drawing minimal water for one-time fills of closed-loop systems. If accurate, that's a significant improvement. Industry sources suggest that a minority of large data centers currently running in Texas still rely on older evaporative cooling—but "a minority" is itself an unverified claim, and even a handful of legacy facilities in drought-stressed regions can strain local aquifers and municipal supplies.
Industry representatives have argued that water challenges can be addressed through engineering solutions and investment. That may well be true at the facility level. The problem is that Texas is not evaluating this facility by facility with any rigor. There is no statewide mandatory water-use reporting requirement specific to data centers. The picture depends largely on what developers choose to share, and "choose" is the operative word.
State officials have acknowledged the need for clearer information on data center water use. The word "clear" is doing heavy lifting there. Legislative committees are working to recommend how to balance data center growth with water infrastructure protection, property rights, and community impacts. But recommendations aren't regulations, and the timeline for translating committee findings into enforceable disclosure rules remains uncertain—meanwhile, new facilities are being permitted and built.
The regulatory gap matters because the scale of Texas's data center ambitions is enormous. The state is positioning itself to compete with established markets like Northern Virginia for dominance in the sector. ERCOT, the state's grid operator, has seen a dramatic surge in interconnection requests, with the waitlist reportedly reaching significant capacity levels—a proxy for just how many large-scale facilities are in the pipeline. Each of those facilities will need water, whether developers frame the volumes as modest or not. Modest consumption multiplied across dozens of new campuses in drought-prone regions is not modest at all.
The broader pattern here matters for anyone tracking the environmental cost of AI-powered computing. We've previously covered how AI's carbon footprint could rival 10 million cars by 2030, and water consumption is the quieter half of that equation. Carbon emissions at least have corporate pledges and disclosure frameworks, however imperfect. Water use in Texas data centers has essentially neither. Whether the state's drought-stricken aquifers can keep pace with its data center ambitions, even with closed-loop technology, is a question the developers are eager to answer on their own terms. The question Texas lawmakers should be asking is why they're letting them.
