Posted on 07/30/2025 4:05:59 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
Texas has long been defined by oil, heat, and huge infrastructure projects. Now, it’s also at the center of a growing environmental debate. Microsoft’s Stargate campus in Abilene is leading a data center boom that is drawing concern over water use, right in the middle of a prolonged drought.
According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle, data centers across Central Texas are consuming millions of gallons of water every day. This comes as many residents are being asked to reduce their usage due to dwindling supplies.
The problem is not limited to one city. In San Antonio, Microsoft and U.S. Army Corps facilities used a combined 463 million gallons of water in 2023 and 2024, according to local water utility SAWS. That’s the equivalent of usage for tens of thousands of households.
Stargate and the scale of AI
The Stargate campus in Abilene is expected to become one of the largest AI data centers in the world. Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI to develop advanced infrastructure capable of supporting the next generation of large language models. What’s received far less attention is how much water it will take to keep that infrastructure running.
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(Excerpt) Read more at techiegamers.com ...
I, for one, welcome our new water overlords.
Usually cooling water is not destroyed.
This data center stuff is getting really silly. I still don’t see what they sell and how they make money.
Recycling the water makes sense.
Using the heated water makes sense also.
AI data centers must be required to generate the electricity used and provide cooling without using existing water supplies.
It is mostly used for cooling, right? It is not like the bits and bytes actually drink it and turn it into urine? And it isn’t that it takes hordes of people to run those places and they drink it down by the gallons and shower at work?
Why not recycle it, rather than letting it go down the drain?
Fake news - not even in CA do DC’s use so much water that local residents are told to consume less water.
Electric power creation and big electric use both need cooling and to get cooling you need to use power.
SMN - Small modular nuclear is the answer for A.I. data centers; their own power and no strain on the grid.
Maybe they can ask Kerr County officials to source their water supply.
You beat me to it.
Yeah the State / Local Communities should require the data centers to supply their own utilities. It isn’t like they have huge payrolls of thousands of employees that benefit the towns and states with their economic impact so that the community figures it is worth it to supply them their needs..
YES!
But the last nuke plant took over 15 years to get built/certified.
I thought data centers recycle the water and not consume it. Seems a stupid article.
Supposedly they planned to recycle water.
They have an on-site power plant Fired by natural gas for something like 1.2
Something like 370 permanent employees and 8 buildings with 50,000 nvidia processors in each building.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-stargate-first-ai-data-center-texas/
I still don’t understand what they sell or even how facebook makes money. It all smacks of another dot com bubble to me. Never mind bit coin.
They store info for banks, techs, Healthcare, gov, etc.
Places like Iowa with abundant water and energy have attracted a surprising number of large data centers:
https://www.businessrecord.com/growth-of-data-centers-in-iowa/
...Number of acres: At least 6,644 acres.
Number of square feet: At least 15.3 million square feet of data center space that is either operational, under construction or proposed.
Dollars invested (or is planned to be invested) by data center operators: Nearly $14.7 billion since the mid-2000s...
Depends on the size. I worked on a campus that had 1 guy working where others might have a dozen.
Consumptive vs non consumptive use. For once through cooling the water is returned to the river or lake warmer but not much evaporated.
Evaporative cooling towers lose water via evap and it’s 80+% consumptive use the blow down water is only blown down when the mineral ppm gets to percentages and scale is the issues. That salty water has to be either diluted with more fresh water and send down the sewer or you do zero discharge which evaps the blow down to solids for landfill. This article is pointing out that datacenters tend to use evaporation cooling towers they are smaller and more efficient than dry or wet towers with water recycle.
Central Texas and West Texas are semi arid and water is always stressed. Droughts are broken by a tropical storm and then you get flash floods in flash flood alley. A couple of lakes are set up to catch this feast and famine. Lake Travis, Canyon Lake and Lake Medina all are in flash flood alley and all of them have flood pools above the conservation pool depth. They store the water only as long as it takes to let it out down stream and not flood the rivers so the additional acre feet is lost unless you have a means to capture it off stream and store it. San Antonio is now doing artificial aquifer recharge using flood or excess recycled water to inject in to the Edwards aquifer, Austin is looking at doing the same and Dallas is looking at the Trinity aquifer since lakes have mostly been built where they can be in Texas no major new lakes are going to be built there is just not the land nor run off for it.
We have the Gulf of America right on our shores which has unlimited water in it. We have a nuke plant with two empty pads and two running reactors that we could use the waste heat from both and build two more and desal said Gulf of America put the datacenters right next door for power and water both from the nukes.
Desal also doesn’t need to run 24/7 you can do intermittent desal if you set it up from the very beginning to be designed to do so. This means you can use wind at night and curtailment solar during the day to desal with. Water stores cheap it takes 3kWh to make a cubic meter of desal water so water stores energy at fairly h ugh density and super cheap with ring dikes and clay lined ponds. It’s only 450 feet up hill to Austin or 600 ish for San Antonio unlike far West Texas where it’s 3000+ feet. Water pumps horizontally easy vertically not so much. So both those cities are under 135 miles to the Gulf and their closest coastal point. The east side of Bexar and Travis country both are under 450 feet above sea level. This means both cities are well within range and elevation for mass pumping of desal to them. California moves water over 400+ miles and over 3000+ feet of elevation change up hill so Texas is easy peasy compared to that.
‘Why not recycle it, rather than letting it go down the drain?’
Exactly!
Not all of them. Cisco has some unique and very efficient data centers. I helped.
The process of cooling the datacenter warms the water. The water absorbs the heat of the datacenter.
Rather than spending MORE energy to cool it back down to usable temps, they dump it and get new water.
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