Texas officials told lawmakers at a state Senate hearing on Tuesday that they want to know how much water data centers across the state are using, but there is no master mailing list. The regulators are thus uncertain whether they’re reaching facility operators at the right address, or if they’re being ignored.
The lack of a definitive list of contact information has made compiling data about the large facilities’ water and power use difficult and incomplete for the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) and the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC), the officials said at the Senate Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs committee hearing about water consumption rates for data centers’ resource-intensive cooling processes.
Failure to comply with TWDB surveys, the officials noted, is a misdemeanor under Texas law, but enforcement authority lies with local district attorneys.
“We just collect information and are aware of who did not respond,” said Temple McKinnon, the TWDB’s director of water supply planning.
Connie Corona, executive director of the PUC, said having some type of contact list that regulators could reference would be helpful. Corona, whose agency oversees data centers’ connection to the grid, said a significant number of operators are worried about the confidentiality of their information.
Sen. Charles Perry, a West Texas Republican, said that’s not an excuse. Water is a fungible asset available for the more than 30 million Texans, Perry said, so there will be no confidentiality on water use.
“If that’s a proprietary problem for you as a business model, your business model needs to work differently because you’re asking for a public resource,” Perry said.
It’s not the first time the industry has been shamed for its evasiveness. Its refusal to fully divulge water needs has upset both residents and regulators, especially as Texas is changing its grid and water planning methods to account for the growing fleet of data centers across the state. It’s expected that the industry will face a slew of bills regulating data centers in the upcoming legislative session, and that the facilities will play a large role in Texas’ midterm elections.
After months of backlash, Gov. Greg Abbott essentially put a moratorium last month on new data centers connecting to the grid until an audit can be conducted on the projects’ viability and community impacts.
The TWDB sent out its annual, mandatory survey to 341 data center operators in January, as well as follow-up reminders and direct messages to those who hadn’t responded by July. As of August 26, only 30 percent, or about 100 facilities, responded, said Temple McKinnon, director of water supply planning.
The 2025 survey was sent to more than 4,700 municipal water systems and 3,200 industrial water users. The answers help inform the water demand projections that the water board drafts every five years for the state’s water supply planning process.
The questions for data centers ask whether they have on-site power generation, whether they purchase their water or are self-supplied, the source of that supply and the annual volume of the water they use. It doesn’t inquire about the data centers’ cooling technologies or fuel types.
Senators were surprised that more than 200 data center operators failed to respond to a statutorily-required document, and they discussed how to boost enforcement. One method: requiring survey responses before getting connected to water.
“We have potentially 200 entities out there that are kind of in the Wild West,” said state Sen. César Blanco, a Democrat from El Paso.
Because responses to the TWDB’s annual surveys had been low in the past, the agency partnered with the PUC in October 2025 to try to collect voluntary, useful information from data centers, both planned and operational.
This year, the two agencies issued a joint survey on April 2 and waited through May 28 for responses, which were far from overwhelming, so they reopened the survey for 10 days in July.
In the end, three-quarters of the 155 respondents were data centers, and two-thirds were operational. Of the projects that are up and running, nearly 60 percent are concentrated in five counties: Dallas, Travis, Harris, Collin and Bexar.
In response to the TWDB and PUC’s survey, 81 facilities reported nearly 1.3 billion gallons of total water intake, 964 million of those being potable water—the primary source for both existing and planned facilities.
Most of the PUC and TWDB survey respondents reported that their facilities use, or will use, non-evaporative cooling systems, which tend to be less water intensive and more energy demanding. Non-evaporative cooling systems can use a closed loop system, which circulates the same liquid over and over to cool the hot server racks inside the data center. The liquid runs by the computers, picks up heat, and then the warm water either goes to a refrigerator or the heat is transferred outside through huge fans. By contrast, evaporative cooling releases heat through vapor and needs constant replenishment of water.
In 2025, 12 evaporatively cooled facilities used nearly 29 millions of gallons of water, and 45 non-evaporatively cooled projects used nearly 8 million gallons of water.
Facilities using evaporative cooling systems on average used nearly four times more water per megawatt hour of energy, according to PUC analysis.
As this comparison is inferred from data on 57 of the 155 facilities within the data set, the results are probably best viewed as directional rather than definitive for the broader population of data centers and cryptomines, said Chris Brown, the program manager of data analysis at the PUC.
Cooling helps prevent chips in data centers from overheating, as all of the electrical energy is converted into heat. This comes as the power needed to develop artificial intelligence is expected to increase. Vaibhav Bahadur, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who is teaching a course on cooling data centers this semester, said the electrical power of 100 homes can go into one rack of microprocessors, about the size of a tall bookshelf.
As technology progresses, so will the efficiency of the cooling towers, Bahadur said. But in order to get more accurate numbers about the amount of water being used by the industry, the state needs better data, he said.
While there is no fresh water left to be allocated, Bahadur said, there are alternative water sources industrial facilities could use. The data center industry is increasingly interested in using groundwater and the wastewater of the oil and gas industry. In the Permian Basin, the country’s most prolific oil field, Bahadur said there’s enough hypersaline, toxic wastewater to fill 1,300 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day.
“I think this is something that needs a more serious consideration because it can be a meaningful solution to the water issues of data centers,” Bahadur said.
Sen. Perry said it’s unacceptable to waste water through evaporative cooling in any sector. “I hope that’s loud and clear,” he said. “That won’t be allowed coming out of the next session. I promise.”
Large data center operators, including QTS Data Centers and Google, said if there was the opportunity to utilize produced water from oil and gas wells, they’d take it into consideration.
A portion of two of Google’s data center campuses in Midlothian and Red Oak are using evaporative cooling. Ben Townsend, head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google, said the company decided to partially use evaporative cooling because it’s more energy efficient, for both the data center itself and the facility’s power plant.
Evaporative cooling doesn’t need to rely on drinking water or groundwater, Townsend said. The energy efficiency benefits can be unlocked with brackish or treated produced water, he said.
“My strong feeling is it’s all about asking the question: What type of water are you using?” Townsend said. “Where is it coming from? What is the impact today, tomorrow? How are you investing to make sure that you are leaving the watershed in better shape than you found it?”
Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, asked whether the state should consider requiring large data centers to have enforceable curtailment plans for water use, similar to those recently made available for power on the grid. Connie Corona, the executive director of the PUC, said it’s certainly something that the Legislature could consider implementing.
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Arcelia Martin is an award-winning journalist at Inside Climate News. She covers renewable energy in Texas from her base in Dallas. Before joining ICN in 2025, Arcelia was a staff writer at The Dallas Morning News and at The Tennessean. Originally from San Diego, California, she’s a graduate of Gonzaga University and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
