Corpus Christi is surrounded by the water of the Gulf, but they are still facing an historic water crisis as the city’s main reservoirs threaten to drop below levels that could keep the city in drinking water. The crisis is not just about watering lawns and long showers, though, 50-60% of the city’s water goes to the industrial customers, mainly refineries and other petrochemical processing facilities. A recent report finds that the city failed to account for the impacts of climate change, causing an underestimate in intensity of future droughts. Higher temperatures during the recent years of drought have raised evaporation rates on area reservoirs, depleting water supplies faster than expected.
The situation in Corpus Christi should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of the state as lawmakers from city councils to the Texas Legislature weigh the costs, benefits — and political stakes — of the growing data center industry.
Water availability and drought have plagued the western half of the state for more than a decade, with major impacts on agriculture and ranching that have devastated the economies of small towns. Residents worried about their own access to water are angry that large industrial customers like data centers are being allowed access to these already dwindling water reserves.
Industry representatives invited to testify in front of the House State Affairs Committee in April downplayed concerns about water use. One representative said that a data center his company built uses the same amount of water as five households in a given year. Another joked that the biggest source of water use at his facility was the employee toilets.
Data centers use water in two ways. The first is for cooling the thousands of servers that make up the operation. Industry representatives are quick to point out that closed-loop cooling systems, once they are charged with water initially, require minimal ongoing water use. But closed-loop cooling systems require more energy than other means of cooling. Most of the time that energy is generated by natural gas generation, which also requires water. An honest assessment of data center water use must include both cooling water and water used in generating electricity when determining the impact of a facility on the local water supply.
It was recently revealed that data center operators have been less than forthcoming about water use, even in cases where it is required by law. Less than a third of the state’s data centers responded to the Public Utility Commission of Texas survey about water and energy use among data centers. And only 17% of Texas’s data centers have responded to a legally required Texas Water Development Board annual water use survey for 2025.
This lack of transparency is adding to the fierce opposition to buildout of the industry in Texas. That opposition seems to have changed political attitudes about the industry. Governor Greg Abbott was once a major proponent of inviting as many data centers as possible to Texas, citing economic benefits. But he called for a suite of data center regulations in a recent letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas. At a recent campaign stop he called for a moratorium on data center construction in rural areas.
The additional strain on the grid is not just a concern for energy availability. Adding a new fleet of natural gas generation in Texas to support data centers would create air quality problems, both from combustion of natural gas and from methane leaks associated with gas recovery, transport, and processing. The biggest problem is that these emissions contribute to climate change. The current heatwaves in Europe and North America are a reminder of the stakes of uncontrolled climate change.
Additional gas generation built to serve data centers could create more climate-harming emissions than some countries, says one report:
Including Stargate’s Abilene campus, at least 15 gas plants tied to data centers are planned for Texas, according to Cleanview. Available permits reviewed by Floodlight show that nine of them combined could emit more than 130 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. That’s the equivalent annual emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants, according to an Environmental Protection Agency calculator.
This buildout of gas-fired generation would be a massive step backward for Texas, which has been a leader in development of renewable energy and now generates about 40% of its electricity needs with solar and wind. Climate mitigation matters in Texas, which is vulnerable to a broad array of harmful climate impacts from extreme heat to flash flooding to vector-borne diseases.
Recent reporting found that the roll back of Clean Water Act protections by the Trump Administration has allowed data center development to proliferate rapidly, as the large industrial facilities are no longer subject to environmental review after many waterways and wetlands were removed from protected status. The lack of environmental review has led to new flooding problems for at least some neighborhoods adjacent to the new development.
Legislators at all levels of government are scrambling to catch up to the rapid deployment of data centers with new regulations and requirements that will ensure the new facilities don’t disrupt life for state residents. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is taking action to prevent data center infrastructure costs from being passed on to residential customers.
The Texas Legislature meets only every other year, so the earliest Texas could create new regulations for data centers about water use, energy use, transmission infrastructure, or anything else, is the spring of 2027. That’s about the same time that the Public Utility Commission of Texas expects to reach a final decision on “Batch Zero”, the first set of large load applications that will be considered under a new policy that groups data center interconnection requests rather than considering them individually. The new practice is intended to address the large number of large load interconnection requests generated by data center development in Texas.
Advocates are worried that the spring timeline for legislative action will be too late. In Texas there are growing calls for a special session so that new data center regulation bills can be filed, considered in committee, and voted on by the legislature. Others are calling for a moratorium until the impact of the buildout can be better understood.
Texans need clean air, clean water, affordable electricity, and protections for our waterways and wetlands. Data centers need guardrails before it is too late.
I'm glad to see Texas starting to pay attention to this issue. Here in Maine, our legislature passed a moratorium on new data centers, but Janet Mills, a Democrat, vetoed it. It killed her Senate campaign, and here we sit without the moratorium, even though it was bi-partisan. Big money still over-rules common sense.