Last year, a Corpus Christi cryptomine guzzled over 11 million gallons. Now, its water usage is being kept secret.

From the Texas Observer:

The drought-stricken City of Corpus Christi is withholding how much water a controversial cryptocurrency mine is siphoning away from surrounding residents.

The Texas Observer reported on the facility’s water burden last year in a series examining the cryptomine and artificial intelligence data center boom unfolding across the state. From May to August last year, the Bitcoin mine consumed 11,563,000 gallons, according to water utility records that the Observer previously obtained via a local resident’s public information request.

Together, the records pointed to an average of about 127,500 gallons a day, well over the 100,000-gallons daily rate that the city uses to label a “high-volume user.” Moreover, records obtained last year showed the city already added a new 4-inch water pipe to the site to help the mine cool its computing hardware with a technique known as liquid immersion.

City Council member Roland Barrera, in whose district the mine is located, said city staff told him the mine is still guzzling about 100,000 gallons a day, or about 3 million gallons a month. Other industrial users, like the city’s petrochemical refineries, use as much as 90 million gallons monthly.

But now, as Corpus Christi faces an ever-deepening water crisis, in response to the Observer’s public information request, the city is refusing to release the latest 2026 records of the mine’s water usage. The city is appealing the Observer’s request for those records to the Texas Office of the Attorney General, citing a section of the Texas Utilities Code that allows nondisclosure of an individual customer’s account. That’s a change from just last year, when the city provided water-usage records.

In February, the city also refused to provide information on commercial car wash water use in response to a request made by KRIS 6, a local TV station covering the water crisis. The attorney general upheld the city’s decision in that case to withhold the information based on its use of an advanced metering system for the business, something the city didn’t specify was at issue for the cryptomine.

Instead, the city argued that it needs written consent from the mine’s operators to disclose the information, citing a statute originally designed to protect residents’ privacy that has since been applied to industrial commercial accounts. The attorney general now has 45 business days to affirm or reject the city’s decision to withhold the records.

City Council member Sylvia Campos was outraged to learn the city was withholding water usage records. “Oh my God, that pisses me off,” she told the Observer. “This is public information. This is water.”

The city’s crisis has made state and national headlines amid predictions that its water demand could exceed supply as early as next summer without additional rainfall or some other water source. With drilled wells already dry and a hot-button desalination plant tabled for now, the city is readying itself for a more serious potential Level 1 Water Emergency, which would impose even more restrictions and penalties for exceeding limits.

Residents already have been living under water restrictions since December 2024, curtailing activities like lawn watering and car washes. The next phase, which might come as early as December, would enforce a mandatory 25-percent reduction for residents, businesses, and large industrial users like petrochemical refineries.

The mine, located on 75 acres just outside the city’s northwest limits, would come under those restrictions, according to Council member Barrera, who helped broker an Industrial District Agreement (IDA) with the project’s original developers beginning in 2022. Barrera told the Observer he now thinks that agreement should be reviewed.

As the Observer previously reported, the city was promised millions of dollars in tax revenue for what was originally a pair of 300-megawatt-capacity Bitcoin mines developed by the Dallas-based Bootstrap Energy. A 2022 presentation by then-Assistant City Secretary Andrea Gardner predicted revenues of $32 to $50 million over a 10-year period in exchange for the city’s de-annexation of the property, a decision that would enable Bootstrap to escape more than $70.5 million in franchise fees and sales tax on its electricity use.

After the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange in 2022, Bootstrap scaled back its project, ultimately developing just one Bitcoin mine on the site, which draws enough energy to power 75,000 homes. The Virginia-based Peak Mining bought Bootstrap’s mine in December 2023.

The city then renegotiated the project’s IDA in 2024, removing the biggest source of revenue outlined in the original agreement: a personal property tax on the mine’s tens of thousands of computer servers and related hardware. From February 7, 2023, to January 8, 2025, mine operators paid the city just $2,639 in Payments in Lieu of Taxes fees, according to records previously obtained by the Observer via the local resident’s records request.

Meanwhile, the project ownership continues to shift. Elektron Energy was set to buy Peak Mining in September 2025, but the deal collapsed in November. The company was instead sold to three companies tied to Tether, a firm with a majority stake in Northern Data, Peak Mining’s original parent company. In September 2025, European authorities raided Northern Data’s offices in Germany and Sweden in an ongoing tax fraud investigation.

Representatives from Tether and Northern Data did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.

The most recent records obtained by the Observer through a public information request and a separate request indicate that the city invoiced mine operators in November 2025 for $1,631.65, and that operators paid $1,647.97 on March 6, well after the due date. Operators paid just $16.48 in April.

City Director of Communications Elisa Olsen told the Observer in a statement that members of the city’s finance team met with Peak Mining representatives on June 5 “to review property improvements and the amount owed to the City” under a separate IDA that governs a battery-storage operation on the same property. According to emails, the firm owes another $100,000.

Separately, Nueces County tax records obtained by the Observer show mine operators paid the county nearly $1 million in property taxes in January.

Now, as the city stares down a water emergency, Barrera told the Observer he’s considering asking the council to terminate the mine’s 2024 IDA prior to its end date in 2039 because the agreement hasn’t yielded the original revenues promised to the city. “Of course ’24 seems like a lifetime ago, with the year that we’ve been having with regard to water,” Barrera told the Observer. “If they’re using the water, they’re using the water, but my challenge is that we haven’t seen the return on the revenue from the IDA.”

Campos also said the project’s IDA, which was brokered before she joined the city council, should get another look. “We need to just do our due diligence. We know that these types of companies, that they use a lot of water, and we should have been more mindful of that instead of just listening to what they had to say,” she said.

Campos and other members have been considering ways to impose limits on industrial users, especially if they don’t comply with water restrictions. But Campos said she fears the council’s authority to do so will be preempted by the state. “Being in Texas, we can’t just say no, and that’s the problem. Our Texas laws seem to override our local laws,” she said. “I understand that cities are being strapped. Their rights are being taken away.”

Still, in the face of growing local opposition to cryptomines and artificial intelligence data centers, leaders at the state level are beginning to balk. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott outlined several regulatory proposals to rein in the state’s rapidly proliferating data centers and cryptomines. Among his recommendations for the upcoming legislative session in 2027 are the repeal of sales tax exemptions for data centers and cryptomines and requirements that would force the facilities to use more efficient “closed-loop” water systems and annually report their water and electricity usage.

Eli McKay, a volunteer for the Sierra Club Coastal Bend Group who urged the Corpus Christi City Council to vote against the original IDA for the local cryptomine as early as 2022, wants to see the council move to reannex the mine’s property.

“It seems like there’s just no accountability whatsoever, and it’s so frustrating to see these things happen, and then [the city] inviting more entities in, be it data centers or chemical plants,” McKay told the Observer. “I would think that they would be putting the citizens first, but it doesn’t feel that way.”