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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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The issue is not the statewide consumption. The Texas water grid is not one unified system. It's a patchwork of local aquifers, municipal supplies, and private wells.
If a datacenter is built in an area with a water grid that can not handle its consumption, people will run out of water sooner or later.
(Especially AI) Datacenters are built in areas with low energy costs, as it is their biggest expense, with no regard for the local water levels:
- https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
So charge them more for the water. The data center builders are making rational decisions based on their costs.
Charging more does not create more water...
Of course not. But it changes the economics that causes things like data centers to be built there.
Water laws are often times asinine on a large scale. Depending on where the center is it'd probably be easier to run them out of town or otherwise cut off the water through sabotage than to increase the price of water.
Honest question: wouldn't it be advantageous to build data centers in cooler areas next to large body's of water, like the upper Midwest? I'm sure there are metrics I'm ignorant of, but that would seem to make more sense than building in a hot/dry place.
Cooler areas with large bodies of water tend to have these pesky things called regulations that means they would make slightly less money.