On Tuesday, the Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs heard testimony during an interval hearing regarding water usage for data centers.
The midterm elections in November and the start of the 90th Parliamentary Program in January have become a focal point.
At the start of the hearing, Chairman Charles Perry (R-Lubbock ) stated,” I think every]Texas Legislature member’s district has had an impact.
Perry claimed to have met and spoken with a number of the” good players” who worked on the data center projects and clients as they prepared for the hearing.
” As always, there are bad celebrities,” he continued, specifically referring to Beacon Data Centers, which is constructing the Westline Energy Infrastructure Campus in his area. Perry claims that Beacon has not spoken to or spoken to locals on a personal levels.
They” choose to work in secrecy,” he said. I don’t think they’re truly a data center, and for that, and that alone, as of right now, I don’t think they’re going to implement wherever they’re going.
Perry argued that data centers have become “way too much of a social sports” and that it is” too big of an issue for Texas to get it wrong and it’s too big of an issue for us to overlook.”
He claimed that” the Legislature, county officials, ]and ] local officials have been politically and publicly beaten up because they should have done something about this.” What this is is an industry that struck this position at a speed that no one should have anticipated or could have anticipated coming.
State lawmakers have been criticized for passing Senate Bill ( SB ) 2023, a bill that provides specific tax incentives for data centers, prior to this governor, during this election cycle.
According to Perry,” The political rhetoric that we as a Government have used to encourage AI data centers over the past two classes is simply not true.” He continued, noting that he doesn’t “begrudge them for” that they” saw an opportunity that they qualified for and took benefit of.
Perry, who stated that he is balanced on the subject, believes that data facilities “provide a lot of excellent benefits,” but that “ones that are reckless will never see the light of day.”
The Texas Water Development Board ( TWDB)’s 2025 water use survey, which sent notices to 341 facilities identified as data centers, was updated to 324 after TWDB found duplicate surveys and unfilled facilities.
According to McKinnon, TWDB had a 30 % response rate among the services surveyed as of August 26.
She also noted that during the 89th Congressional Session, the TWDB and PUC began working together on requirements for a budget horse in SB 1, particularly those that they believed would “gather helpful water use data to better comprehend current and future, direct and indirect water use.”
McKinnon made it clear that the PUC review was a “one-time inquiry into the state’s data centers’ projected power use and the state’s projected future water use.”
The Public Utility Commission of Texas ( PUC) representatives reported that they polled a sample of industrial facilities and found that “energy use and water use have an inverse relationship.” The PUC survey was conducted in two shells, one on April 2 through the month of May 28 and the other on July 1 through July 10.
According to PUC Executive Director Connie Corona,” we wanted to acquire knowledge about both vitality use and water use from the services.”
PUC received responses from 57 businesses, all of which are data centres, out of 168 features.
State Senator Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham ) claimed that the study provides a “pretty good sample of the great actors and the awful actors.” She emphasized that” they did not abide by the law” and that the study demand has been required by law for two years.
We must have a clear understanding of our water usage for long-term planning and to protect our tools, state Sen. Cesar Blanco (D-El Paso ) wrote in an X post on Tuesday.
Dr. Vaibhav Bahadur, interact professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, highlighted the potential use of produced waters, the naturally occurring waste that comes from the removal of oil and natural gas, as cooling cooling facilities.
Despite the high acidity of the ocean, Bahadur claimed that” a respectable portion of the water can be treated more or less with modern technology” He emphasized that produced water should be significantly considered as” a valuable solution to the water problems of data facilities,” even with the potentially high cost of filtration.
A panel of data center experts, including representatives from Lancium Technologies, Quality Technology Services ( QTS), and Google, gave their opinions on how much water and energy are used by their respective businesses.
We pay for all the equipment needed to supply power to our sites, according to QTS and several other reliable state actors. We cover all of the power we use, according to Ryan Kuithe, QTS’s Senior Vice President of Facility Operations. He stated that the company has no intention of asking the city’s inhabitants or taxpayers to help with its growth, and that it has no desire that they will.
Google’s planned data centers in Texas, including those in Haskell, Willbarger, and Armstrong Counties, are” conscientious of limited area water resources and are designed with advanced closed-loop air cooling systems that will help us reduce water usage for cooling,” according to Ben Townsend, head of infrastructure and sustainability at Google.
In addition, Townsend added that Google became” the second big cloud provider to begin reporting site-level water usage shared every yr” in the company’s economic report as of 2023.
Perry warned the board of data centre operators that if they refused to speak with the lawmakers,” the outcome’s not going to be great in the Legislature.”
Kolkhorst claimed that Texans haven’t had a chance to comprehend the scope of data centres.
No one has ever said that it should explain the software and what needs to be done in such a large way. Is this for customer AI? clinical studies automatic arms Financial businesses National security online personality Or is there “government monitoring”? she enquired. Or is it all of the previous?
State Senator Roland Gutierrez (D-San Antonio ) also touched on monitoring:” I gotta know who the hell is looking inside my house, and my computer, and figuring out what the devil I’m gonna get next. And the next issue I want to inquire. People are genuinely concerned about that.
City and county authorities testified that they had not always been aware of information centers until the technician had begun working with utility companies after the sale of private land.
Perry even mentioned how” for the most part” the “landowners in the private sector” are the starting points for data centres, and that county commission and other local authorities are unaware of what is being negotiated on the private level, and should not do it.
Before appearing in his company, Caldwell County Judge Hoppy Haden claimed that in every situation in his state, data centers “bought the property and had already had contact with the power company.”
Perry argued that legislators must be “really clear and really cautious how we start meddling in the agreement regulations between private seller and secret purchaser.”
Perry requested a list of state courts with data centres in their jurisdictions who have not been communicating with native officials from Rick Thompson of the Texas County Judges and Commissioners Association.
” They are not people that should be given state permission,” Perry said, “if they’re not willing to engage the group and assist directors and city leaders in getting over the tail.”
Let’s just say that there will be a hierarchy and enough people in the pipeline to work with, Perry said,” Let’s just say that those methods are still under our guise to work with.”
Johnson emphasized that the business is not opposed to information facilities, even though it wants fair rules to protect the communities.
This is a chance for remote Texas regions to make a living, he said. People don’t relocate to remote Texas. They are emigrating from remote Texas. The children are departing. There is nothing in several areas for them.
