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Texas is seeing massive growth with AI data centers. There has been attention on their incredible energy demands; however, little attention has been paid to their equally incredible water consumption. But it’s becoming clear that if left unchecked, AI water use could impact the availability of water in drought-stricken Texas.
Outside of Abilene, construction is underway on the world’s largest AI data center— which is part of the five hundred billion dollar endeavor called Stargate.
When complete, Project Stargate One will sit on 940 acres, an area larger than Central Park in New York City. The planned power demand is up to 1.2 Gigawatts for the full campus. That would be enough to power a million average homes.
And there’s a concern about water use. Data centers for AI and cryptocurrency mining use a lot of water.
“If you ask ChatGPT 10 to 50 questions, then it consumes about 50 milliliters of water,“ said Yi Ding, professor at Purdue University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering specializing in developing sustainable AI. 50 milliliters of water is about a quarter of a cup. Ding said all those cups of water quickly add up as more and more people are using AI.
Ding recently published the paper "Not All Water Consumption Is Equal: A Water Stress Weighted Metric for Sustainable Computing" which was published in HotCarbon 2025. She found that since 2022, two-thirds of new U.S. data centers are located in water scarce regions, including Texas and Arizona.
“Open AI and some bitcoin mining companies, they are all investing heavily in Texas to build data centers. Texas is actually a relatively high water stress region. It's very intensive because people also need water to live,” she said.
The average, midsized data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day, roughly the use of a thousand homes. According to a policy brief from the Houston Advanced Research Center and University Houston Energy, data centers in Texas will consume 46 billion gallons of water in 2025. They project that by 2030, that number could rise up to 399 billion gallons or about 7% of the total water use in Texas.
“That's a lot of water, and quite frankly, it's a bit alarming because we are already a state struggling with our water supplies,” said Robert Mace, the executive director at The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment in San Marcos.
“You’ve got to have the water to have water for cooling,” he said.
Heat is the enemy of data operations, reducing their efficiency or even making them inoperable. What creates the heat? The multitude of servers burning vast amounts of electricity. “And I think a lot of these data centers are going to find out that it's going to be hard to get that water and it may simply not be available, which is probably going to force them towards the closed loop cooling,” Mace said.
Closed loop systems for data center cooling conserves water because it doesn’t allow the evaporative cooling vaper to escape into the atmosphere. The steam is captured and used over and over.
“That'll be far more water efficient. That does still require water, but it's substantially less water than an open loop cooling system,” Mace said.
According to documents supplied by Caruso Energy —the builder of Abilene’s Stargate — they will be using a closed loop system to conserve water. Caruso made the choice to use less water, but not all data centers will make that choice.
Julie Nahrgang, the executive director of the Water Environment Association of Texas, said water saving steps should be taken now as these data centers are being planned. She said there's no Texas miracle without available water.
“If Texas is looking at this as a business growth opportunity and a chance to lead the nation in this innovative growth place, then water should be one of the paramount considerations. And to that end, Texas should consider incentivizing, requiring or requiring data centers to look at strategies to reduce water demands,” she said.
But Nahrgang said the Texas water plan isn’t taking into account Big Tech’s big thirst. “All of these compounding pressures on our water supply mean that that better planning is needed before we find ourselves in a water supply deficit that we can't innovate out of,” she said.
More gargantuan data centers are coming to some of the driest parts of Texas.
Near Amarillo, Texas Tech University and former Secretary of Energy and Governor Rick Perry is leading the plan for an AI data center that will be five times larger than Abilene’s Stargate.
It will be powered partly by nuclear energy and it has not disclosed how much water it will need. This project is expected to be named the "Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus."
