Despite five years of below-average rainfall and longterm drought gripping the region, a pair of San Antonio data centers used a combined 463 million gallons of water in 2023 and 2024, Techie + Gamers magazine reports, citing a recent study.
The data in the analysis, compiled by San Antonio Water System, revealed that the Alamo City facilities run by Microsoft and the Army Corps guzzled water equivalent to the usage of tens of thousands of households.
The revelation comes as SAWS enforces Stage 3 watering rules, meaning San Antonio residents are only allowed to water lawns once per week and on a specially designated day. Homes that use more than 20,000 gallons of water also are subject to additional surcharges.
“While surprise rains generated some green around San Antonio, they did not bring us out of drought,” a July 1 blog on the SAWS website states. “It will take many more steady rainfalls to overcome the last five years of less-than-adequate rain.”
However, data centers have been under no such restrictions as they power their generative AI models. While the Texas Legislature passed a bipartisan bill in its most recent regular session to divert energy from data centers during extreme weather outages, lawmakers passed no bills regulating how much water the centers can use.
Central Texas data centers consume millions of gallons of water daily, according to an Austin Chronicle investigation published last week. Midsized data centers use approximately 300,000 gallons daily while large data centers can use as many as 4.5 million gallons per day, the Chronicle reports. Austin alone has 47 data centers while Dallas-Fort Worth has the most in the state at 189 facilities.
A report by the Houston Advanced Research Center estimates data centers statewide will use 49 billion gallons of water this year. The facilities use the water to cool their powerful computers, which generate significant heat.
Further exacerbating the strain on natural resources, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman broke ground last year on Abilene’s Stargate Texas data center, a $500 billion project announced by President Donald Trump in January.
With a size 60 acres larger than Central Park, Stargate is soon to be the largest data center in the world, whether the parched landscape — or its electrical grid — can handle it or not. The facility is expected to use enough energy to power 750,000 homes, the Chronicle reports, while also being a massive drain on the water supply.
“These centers are showing up in places that are very water-stressed,” Margaret Cook, a water policy analyst at the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), told Techie + Gamers. “There’s no requirement for them to have conversations with communities about how much water they’ll use.”
By 2030, data centers are expected to multiply tenfold across the Lone Star State, according to the Chronicle. HARC estimates that by then, data center water consumption could total 399 billion gallons annually, or 6.6% of Texas’ total water use.
Data centers’ seemingly unquenchable thirst, combined with the resource demands of a rapidly increasing population, could deplete reserves intended for future generations, Cook said.
“So, any of these communities that are allowing data centers in their community are gambling against being able to get new water from future state water plans, from future funding cycles,” Cook told the Chronicle. “They’re using up the water that was allocated to their population for the future.”
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This article appears in Jul 23 – Aug 6, 2025.