Texas Regulators Lack Basic Contact List for Data Centers, Complicating Water Oversight

Texas regulators told state senators this week that they cannot compile reliable data on data center water and power use because they lack something as basic as a master mailing list. That admission, delivered at a Senate Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs committee hearing on Tuesday, points to a regulatory infrastructure that has not kept pace with the industry it is supposed to oversee.

The gap is not trivial. The Texas Water Development Board sent its annual, mandatory survey to 341 data center operators in January. Follow-up reminders and direct outreach continued through July. As of August 26, only about 100 facilities, roughly 30 percent, had responded. Failure to comply is a misdemeanor under Texas law, but enforcement sits with local district attorneys, not the TWDB itself.

Temple McKinnon, the TWDB's director of water supply planning, summed up the agency's limited leverage plainly: "We just collect information and are aware of who did not respond." That is a compliance function without teeth.

Connie Corona, executive director of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which oversees data centers' grid connections, said a reference list of operator contacts would help. She also noted that a significant number of operators cite confidentiality concerns as a reason for withholding information.

State Sen. Charles Perry, a West Texas Republican, rejected that argument outright. Water, he said, is a shared resource for more than 30 million Texans, and there will be no confidentiality carve-out for its 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.

Why It Matters

This is not the industry's first brush with scrutiny over data disclosure. The pattern of incomplete responses has frustrated both regulators and residents, arriving just as Texas overhauls its grid and water planning frameworks to account for a fast-growing fleet of large facilities. Lawmakers are expected to introduce a wave of data center bills next legislative session, and the issue looks set to feature prominently in the state's midterm elections.

Gov. Greg Abbott has already acted. Facing months of backlash, he imposed what amounts to a moratorium last month on new data centers connecting to the grid, pending an audit of project viability and community impact. ERCOT has said that audit will be completed in December.

The TWDB's broader 2025 survey went out to more than 4,700 municipal water systems and 3,200 industrial users, feeding into the five-year water demand projections the state relies on for supply planning. The data center-specific questions ask about on-site power generation, whether water is purchased or self-supplied, the source of that supply, and annual volume. Notably, the survey does not ask about cooling technology or fuel type, an omission that limits its analytical value even for operators who do respond.

Because response rates have historically been weak, the TWDB partnered with the PUC in October 2025 on a separate, voluntary joint survey aimed at both planned and operational facilities. That survey opened April 2, closed May 28, then reopened for ten additional days in July after initial participation fell short. In the end, three-quarters of the 155 respondents were data centers, two-thirds of them operational, with nearly 60 percent of running facilities concentrated in five counties: Dallas, Travis, Harris, Collin, and Bexar.

Of the 81 facilities that reported water intake figures, total consumption came to nearly 1.3 billion gallons, with 964 million gallons drawn from potable sources, the dominant supply for both existing and planned projects. Most respondents reported using, or planning to use, non-evaporative cooling systems, which reduce water use but increase energy draw. In 2025, 12 evaporatively cooled facilities used nearly 29 million gallons of water, while 45 non-evaporative facilities used nearly 8 million gallons. According to PUC analysis, evaporative facilities used roughly four times more water per megawatt hour than their non-evaporative counterparts. Chris Brown, the PUC's program manager of data analysis, cautioned that the comparison draws on just 57 of 155 facilities and should be read as directional rather than definitive.

State Sen. César Blanco, an El Paso Democrat, captured the senators' unease over the compliance gap: "We have potentially 200 entities out there that are kind of in the Wild West." Lawmakers discussed tying survey compliance to water connection approval as one enforcement fix.

Vaibhav Bahadur, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin who teaches a course on data center cooling, noted the scale of the problem. A single server rack, roughly the size of a tall bookshelf, can draw the electrical power of 100 homes. Cooling efficiency will improve as the technology matures, he said, but the state needs better underlying data to track it. Fresh water allocations, meanwhile, are essentially maxed out, pushing the industry toward alternatives like groundwater and oil and gas wastewater. In the Permian Basin alone, Bahadur said, there is enough hypersaline, toxic produced water to fill 1,300 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day.

Large operators including QTS Data Centers and Google indicated openness to using produced water from oil and gas wells if the opportunity arose. Google already partially uses evaporative cooling at two Texas campuses, in Midlothian and Red Oak. Ben Townsend, the company's head of infrastructure and sustainability, said the tradeoff favors energy efficiency for both the data center and its associated power plant, and that the efficiency gains do not require drinking water or groundwater if brackish or treated produced water is used instead. "What type of water are you using? Where is it coming from?" Townsend asked, framing disclosure as the starting point for accountability.

Perry made clear he views evaporative cooling as an avoidable waste. "I hope that's loud and clear," he said. "That won't be allowed coming out of the next session. I promise." Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Corpus Christi Republican, raised the idea of mandatory, enforceable water curtailment plans for large facilities, modeled on existing grid curtailment tools. Corona said the Legislature could certainly consider it.

The Bottom Line

Texas is trying to regulate a resource-intensive industry it cannot fully see. With 200-plus operators unaccounted for in mandatory surveys and confidentiality claims muddying voluntary disclosure, the state's water and grid planning rests on incomplete data. Expect legislative action next session tying connection approval to compliance, alongside renewed pressure on operators to disclose sourcing, particularly as alternatives like produced water gain traction as a partial fix.