Gov. Greg Abbott has directed the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency tasked with overseeing the state’s water planning process, to penalize data centers that do not report their water usage.
The directive comes as Texas grapples with rapidly growing demand for water from data centers and other large industrial users — and as few as 28% of data centers have responded to a state-mandated water usage survey in the last three years. The water agency collects the information from the annual survey to help determine how much water the state will need in the future.
