One reason the buildout in Central Texas matters beyond Central Texas is that the same companies driving it have begun openly arguing that AI compute will eventually outgrow Earth’s available land, water, and grid capacity. The proposed answer is to put the next generation of data centers in low-Earth orbit and power them with space-based solar — and the most concrete bet on that thesis so far is being built about thirty minutes from downtown Austin.
The proposal is to put racks of compute on satellites already drawing continuous solar input above the atmosphere, networked together as a constellation, and use the cold of space — ~3 K background — as the heat sink instead of cooling towers. The claimed advantages are 24/7 solar without weather or night, passive radiative cooling without water, and unbounded siting that does not displace a town or aquifer. The hard problems are launch cost, radiation hardening, in-orbit serviceability, latency for ground users, and end-of-life debris — none of which are solved at hyperscale today.
Whether or not orbital data centers ship at the scale their backers envision, the supply-chain commitment is already being made on Earth — in Bastrop, in Grimes, in the chip and solar plants being approved alongside conventional hyperscale campuses. The report’s regulatory and technological recommendations apply equally to the supply chain: the water, energy, tax, and disclosure questions are the same whether the eventual user is a server rack in Cedar Creek or a satellite at 550 km.
A plain-language summary of the 62-page report from the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance on how AI and crypto-mining facilities are reshaping the state’s grid, water supply, public budgets, and the air around them.
The San Antonio–Austin corridor saw a four-fold increase in construction between 2023 and 2025 and is ranked first among global emerging markets. Over 400 facilities are operating across 25 Texas markets, with hyperscale AI campuses and crypto mines driving the next wave.
AI and data centers aren’t going away — but Texas’s regulatory framework was built for a slower, smaller-load industrial economy. Without guardrails on transparency, cost allocation, water and energy use, and local control, the buildout will raise costs for ordinary Texans, deplete water supplies, and harm public health — disproportionately in rural, unincorporated, and drought-stressed communities.
Data centers already use enough power to supply over half of Texas homes. ERCOT was designed to handle 40–50 interconnection requests; it received 225 in 2025.
Texas’s State Water Plan won’t reflect data-center use until at least 2032, worsening an already-projected 5M acre-feet shortfall by 2070. Two San Antonio facilities used 463M gallons during the 2023–24 drought.
Fossil-fueled generation creates particulate matter and NO₂. Cooling systems and generators emit constant low-frequency noise. Data centers create local heat islands averaging +3.6°F, sometimes up to +16°F.
The state’s data-center sales-tax exemption cost $1.016B in FY2025 — nearly 8× the original projection. Counties have no zoning authority, leaving rural areas exposed.
Electricity is economic. Water is existential.— Texas Senate staffer, quoted in the GEAA report
The state has no mandatory reporting for water or energy use by data centers. Counties have no zoning authority. Cities can be stripped of jurisdiction through de-annexation. Non-disclosure agreements bar elected officials from telling constituents what’s coming.
The GEAA report’s recommendations split into policies the state and locals should adopt — and technologies operators should adopt regardless of what the legislature does.
The short answer is: a lot, but only by stacking five or six choices that have to be made early — at siting, at design, and during procurement. None of the items below is a silver bullet, several work in some climates and not others, and a few are still pre-commercial in the U.S. This section deepens the technology column of the report’s “two tracks of guardrails,” organized by the resource pressure each set of tools is trying to ease.
Most of the water a data center consumes goes to cooling: either directly inside the building (evaporative towers, adiabatic pads) or indirectly through the thermal-electric power plants on the other end of the wire. Replacing evaporation with closed-loop heat transfer is the single largest lever an operator can pull on water.
A data center can change two things about its electricity: what kind it consumes (carbon intensity) and when it consumes it (flexibility). The second is what ERCOT increasingly values, because Texas already has more curtailed wind and solar than most U.S. grids combined.
Most of the air, noise, and heat-island harms the report flags trace to two physical realities: diesel or gas combustion on-site for backup and peaking, and the building exhausting waste heat into the surrounding air. Both are addressable with technology already on the shelf.
Every watt the chip does not draw is a watt that does not have to be cooled, generated, transmitted, or supplied with water upstream. Efficiency gains at the silicon, system, and workload layers compound through the rest of the stack — a 30% chip-side gain stacked on a 30% cooling-side gain stacked on a 30% grid-intensity gain is, very roughly, two-thirds less harm per unit of useful work.
A campus’s resource footprint is partly cast in concrete on day one and partly determined by what happens at the end of a 15- to 25-year useful life. Both ends are technological choices.
The engineering exists, much of it is mature, and most of it is cheaper than the alternatives within a 7- to 10-year horizon. What is missing is not the technology — it is the regulatory or contractual requirement to use any of it. The report’s two-track recommendation works because, absent the first track, the second is selected only on the projects where it happens to be the cheapest path. The open Texas question is whether SB 6 rulemaking and the 90th Legislature’s interim studies turn this menu into a baseline expectation or leave it on the “nice to have” shelf.
The clearest test of the report’s warnings is happening about 25 miles east of downtown, in a stretch of unincorporated Bastrop County around Cedar Creek. Hyperscalers are buying land, a 1,170 MW gas peaker plant is seeking school-district tax breaks, and county commissioners — without zoning authority — have already urged TCEQ to approve the air permits. Three concurrent projects, on or next to the same site, mirror nearly every concern flagged in the GEAA report.
The Austin Business Journal has identified more than 30 data-center projects in the greater Austin area in recent years, with a combined $50 billion+ in capital investment — likely an undercount, since corporate buyers regularly use shell entities and label early-stage acquisitions as “due diligence.” Bastrop County is the current epicenter, but Hays, Williamson, and Travis counties are seeing similar pressure. Add the supply-chain footprint — solar-cell fabs, chip plants — and the local resource calculus shifts further.
Bastrop County is the current epicenter of the buildout, but the pattern reaches across at least seven Central Texas counties. Below is a working inventory of publicly reported projects and supply-chain facilities as of May 2026, drawn from Austin Business Journal coverage, county commissioners’ court records, ERCOT large-load filings, and zoning hearings. Where details are routed through shell entities or labeled “due diligence,” the line items below reflect what has been publicly attested rather than what the buyer privately intends.
Across these counties the Austin Business Journal puts more than 30 publicly identified projects with a combined $50 billion+ in capital investment — almost certainly an undercount, since hyperscale buyers routinely use shell entities and label early acquisitions as “due diligence” until permits force disclosure. The pattern is consistent: power- and water-rich corridors in the I-35 / Highway 130 footprint draw most of the pressure; the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone draws the most contested projects; counties without zoning authority absorb the heaviest siting decisions; and a supply chain — chip fabs, solar-cell factories, transmission — is being assembled around the same footprint.