Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has directed the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that fail to report their water usage, after state records showed most facilities have ignored the mandatory survey for years.
The Texas Tribune reports that the directive follows a rough stretch of compliance numbers: less than 30 percent of data centers responded to the state’s water usage survey last year, and response rates dipped as low as 28 percent over the past three years. Abbott wants an update from the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) on compliance and enforcement by the middle of October.
“Data centers must share the duty to protect Texas water,” Abbott said. “The Texas Water Code requires a complete and accurate water use survey. I direct the Texas Water Development Board to use its enforcement authority to penalize past failures and to impose legal consequences for any future failure to comply.”
Since 2020, the TWDB has surveyed data centers and other industrial facilities every year, asking for monthly water use figures. State law requires facilities to respond or face a Class C misdemeanor, but the agency says it can’t actually prosecute anyone. It’s a non-regulatory body. That job falls to local officials, including district attorneys and law enforcement, agency officials said. TWDB staff told the Texas Tribune in July that they don’t even track how many fines, if any, have been issued.
The board said it would “compel all water users” to comply, and defended the need for detailed data: “TWDB is charged with developing a state water plan that meets the needs of Texans and cannot perform that task if it is denied detailed information on existing and anticipated water consumption.”
The survey goes out by mail to roughly 4,700 municipal water systems and 3,200 industrial facilities, including data centers that use more than 10 million gallons a year, a threshold the agency considers “a significant industrial user.” It asks for annual water volume, whether a facility buys or self-supplies its water, the water source, and whether the facility generates its own power on site. It does not ask about cooling technology, which has historically been the largest source of water use at these facilities.
The number of data centers under review has grown fast. Between 2020 and 2022, the TWDB surveyed fewer than five data centers a year, and every one of them responded. In 2023, the agency surveyed 22 data centers, and 32 percent responded. In 2024, that number rose to 67 facilities with a 28 percent response rate. Last year, 329 data centers were surveyed, with nearly 30 percent responding. Of those, 267 were new to the agency’s tracking system, and only 22.5 percent of those newly tracked facilities responded.
The 2025 survey identified the state’s biggest water users among data centers: a Bitdeer facility in Rockdale, a Google facility in Midlothian, a QTS facility in Fort Worth, and a Meta facility also in Fort Worth. The Bitdeer facility alone uses more than 300 million gallons a year, comparable to the annual water usage of a small Texas town of about 3,500 people. Most of the state’s data centers cluster in North Texas, where water use is highest.
Separately, Abbott has directed the TWDB to work with the Public Utility Commission of Texas, water utilities and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) on an audit of data centers seeking to connect to the power grid. That audit, ordered by Abbott in August, is meant to gather information on water consumption, water sources and cooling technologies used by these facilities. Under the governor’s directive, projects that fail the audit will be denied grid interconnection.
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Read more at the Texas Tribune here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.