Texas asked data centers to report their water use. Most of them didn’t respond

From KUT News:

Texas lawmakers are calling for the data center industry to be more transparent after it was revealed during a legislative hearing in Austin that the majority of the state’s data centers are not reporting their water usage.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas sent out a survey earlier this year to collect information about water and energy usage among data centers and virtual currency mining facilities. Less than a third of the state’s 341 data centers responded to the survey.

“We’ve received responses from 28 unique companies representing 92 data centers and virtual currency mining facilities at various stages of operation across the state,” Chris Brown, the program manager for data analysis at the PUCT, told lawmakers during a hearing for the Texas House Committee on Natural Resources.

A provision in the state’s 2026-2027 budget directed the commission to conduct the study.

State Rep. Mary González, an El Paso County Democrat, questioned whether the commission’s survey methods affected the response rate.

“We want details of exactly what the agency did on how it recruited respondents,” González said. “When we put a rider in the budget, it is because we want it to be fulfilled with integrity to honor the intent, and I’m not sure that actually happened.”

Mike Hoch, director of communications for the PUCT, responded that the commission is equally as frustrated at the response rate.

“The better data we have, the better decisions that you all can make — that we all can make,” he said.

During the hearing, lawmakers also learned that only 17% of the state’s data centers responded to the Texas Water Development Board’s 2025 annual water use survey.

The survey is required by law, and not participating is punishable as a Class C misdemeanor. It’s meant to help the board draft the 2027 state water plan.

“We focus the limited resources we have towards the higher water users to try to capture the bulk of the state’s water use,” Temple McKinnon, the director of water supply planning at the TWDB, told lawmakers.

McKinnon said data centers have been surveyed since 2020. At that point, there was only one facility, so the board got a 100% response rate. But that rate has declined in recent years as data centers have begun to spread across the state.

Between 2023 and 2025, McKinnon said the number of data centers the board surveyed rose from 22 to 341.

“This rapid emergence of water use is reminiscent of the beginning of fracking around 2009 because it, too, was a new industry with proprietary information,” she said.

McKinnon said the board now uses information from a “frack focused database” to help fill the gaps when data centers don’t respond to its annual water use survey.

“We do whatever we can to fill in those gaps. We’ll estimate around it. We might project, roll that over, estimate forward based upon past use,” she said. “I like to call it just forensic accounting in a way, you know. We ask these folks to report directly, but we’re also looking at many other methods to assess water use.”

State Rep. Brad Buckley, a Republican from Bell County, said the state’s information about how much water data centers are using is “woefully lacking.”

“It appears like the data centers are not reporting enough data for us to make these big, long-term decisions … the impact this will have on water, power, all that other good stuff,” he said.

State Rep. Cody Harris, a Republican from East Texas, agreed.

“The transparency of utilization of resources shouldn’t be optional, and I think that that’s just kind of a low bar that we’re going to be looking to set next session — is disclosing how much water is used and the source of it,” he said.

Harris also lambasted two data center companies that declined an invite to Tuesday’s hearing.

“I invited two witnesses today who refused to come answer questions, Diode Ventures and Calypso,” Harris said. “They didn’t decline due to scheduling conflicts or any other acceptable reason. They just simply didn’t want to face tough questions. Bad actors like these are what have ignited suspicion and skepticism of all data centers in the eye of the public, but I do believe that it is prudent and important to distinguish the bad actors from those who are being good neighbors and good stewards of our resources.”

Other companies, including Amazon, Google and Vantage Data Centers, were present and testified at the hearing.

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