Texas Data Centers Could Use 225 Billion Gallons of Water by 2030. The State Plan Counts None of It

Texas has built a process to decide which data centers get connected to the power grid. It has nothing equivalent for water. Two research groups have now put numbers on that gap, and their estimates suggest that the water footprint of the state's data center boom could grow several times over by 2030. The latest is a white paper from the COMPASS research consortium at the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, first published in December 2025 and updated in August 2026.

It estimates that Texas data centers used about 33 billion gallons of water in 2025, counting both on-site cooling and the water consumed by power plants that supply them. Direct use, mainly evaporative cooling at the data center itself, was about 13 billion gallons in 2025, under an assumed 8 GW of data center power capacity. The figures are consistent with an independent estimate from the Houston Advanced Research Center. In a white paper released on January 21, HARC put existing Texas data center water use at about 25 billion gallons a year for electricity generation and cooling, or 0.4% of state water use.

The forecasts diverge widely, because they depend on how much of the proposed capacity gets built. How a data center is cooled decides most of its direct water use. The core problem identified by both groups is that Texas does not plan for this demand. "Texas' water planning process has a structural blind spot," said Margaret Cook, HARC's vice president of water and community resilience and the paper's primary author. HARC recommends requiring large industrial users to report expected water and electricity use, building forward-looking forecasts into the State Water Plan and offering incentives for water-lean technology such as dry cooling and brackish water reuse. "The resource footprint of data centers is not a future challenge; it is already here," Cook said.