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This is the first of a two-part series examining the ongoing impacts of extreme weather patterns and accelerating demand on Texas’ water supply and how resource planners seek to avert catastrophe by rethinking water conservation and use.
Just outside Travis County, orange letters flicker across an electronic sign along U.S. 290: “STAGE 2 DROUGHT.”
A decade ago, that stretch of highway toward Dripping Springs was largely undeveloped. Today, it is lined with fast-food restaurants, nail salons and other signs of rapid growth. Infrequent rainfall has turned the grass along the roadside yellow and brown.
The warning signs and sickly grass are becoming common across Texas. More than 4.5 million of the state’s 35 million residents are experiencing drought, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center’s U.S. Drought Monitor. At the same time, population and economic growth are putting additional pressure on water supplies, prompting municipal planners to prepare for stricter conservation measures.
Texas is betting its future on water it might not have.
Drought, hotter temperatures and erratic rainfall are tightening supplies just as population growth, manufacturing and a proposed data-center boom push demand higher.
Without new conservation measures or water-use plans, Texas’ demand for water could outpace available supplies within four years.
Under extreme drought conditions, the Texas Water Development Board projects that the state could face a water shortage of 3.6 million acre-feet by 2030. That’s enough to supply roughly 8 million U.S. homes for a year, as one-acre feet is roughly 325,900 gallons.
Locally, the city-owned Austin Water utility projected in 2024 that demand will increase by at least 154% over the next 100 years, or by 450,000 homes.
“Right now, with all of the water supply projects that we currently have available, we will not meet our water needs,” Margaret Cook, vice president of water and community resilience at the Houston Advanced Research Center, told the Austin Free Press.
These sobering estimates do not take into account the proposed statewide data center build-out that could lead to a demand increase of 494,000 acre-feet in 2030, according to a Houston Advanced Research Center study published before Aug. 3, when Gov. Greg Abbott put a temporary hold on those facilities and directed an audit of them. That’s like adding 1.1 million homes to the demand queue.
Uncharted waters
When precipitation falls, water supplies accumulate both above ground and below. Surface water gathers in lakes, rivers and streams, while groundwater seeps into underground gravel, sand and rock deposits called aquifers.
Austin Water obtains most of its supply from lakes Travis and Buchanan, which were created by damming the Colorado River above Austin in the 1930s and ‘40s. Austin Water has secured rights to use up to 325,000 acre-feet of that water a year and currently uses 50% of that, according to a statement utility representatives wrote to the Austin Free Press.
The Lower Colorado River Authority manages the climate-fluctuating inflows into these lakes and four others, together called the Highland Lakes. Central Texas sits at the confluence of subtropical and arid climates, subjecting the region to both flooding and drought. Floods in 2025 and this summer replenished Travis and Buchanan to 99% of their capacities, according to the LCRA. This is not always the case.
Credit: Austin Water Forward Plan
The lakes hit their all-time lowest levels in 2011, when inflows plummeted to 11% of the historic average, according to the Austin Water Forward Plan. Levels remained low throughout the drought of 2008-2016 and again in 2022 and 2023.
Without access to the Highland Lakes, Austin’s neighbors in Hays County are in an even more precarious position. They get their water from the Edwards-Trinity Aquifer, which is at its lowest level in 20 years, according to the Hays Trinity Groundwater Conservation District. The conservation district predicts that the probability of emerging from this drought in six months is less than 6.5%.
Like Hays County, rainfall across Texas has come less frequently in recent decades and often arrives in short, intense bursts instead of predictable “rainy seasons,” according to the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University. Meanwhile, higher temperatures evaporate surface water more quickly.
Historically, hydrologists plan for the so-called “drought of record,” the worst drought ever recorded in a given area. But many experts worry that climate change could be pushing Texas into uncharted waters.
“Climate change is one of the most important environmental challenges that Austin faces,” Austin Water representatives stated. The utility “incorporates the impacts of many possible future climate change scenarios on our water supplies in the evaluation of future water supply needs.”
Cook said that water plans must account for changing temperatures, as Austin Water does. Hotter summers and cooler winters can cause utility infrastructure such as power and water lines to deteriorate or fail. Extreme temperatures also strain heating and cooling systems, consuming even more water.
“Water is impacted when it’s too cold, too hot, too much, too little,” Cook said. “If you exacerbate the drought and the heat wave that people are experiencing, we could see even more shortages, and we are not planning for that.”
Cascading demand
As climate changes constrict Texas water supplies, the amount of water that households and businesses consume rapidly accelerates. The Austin metropolitan area added 510,875 residents between 2013-2023, according to the city’s planning department. Its annual gross domestic product – the value of goods and services produced in the area – grew from $114 billion to $207 billion during that time.
Driven by rapid growth in Travis, Williamson, Hays and Bastrop counties, annual municipal water demand in the lower Colorado River region is expected to nearly double between 2030 and 2080 (from 380,187 acre-feet to 743,729), according to the 2027 Texas State Water Plan. By those estimates, municipal demand in 2080 would drain Barton Springs nearly 50,000 times.
Water consumption for Texas’ manufacturing sector is projected to grow from 1.6 million acre-feet of water use in 2030 to just over 2 million acre-feet in 2080, according to the state water plan. For the lower Colorado River region, manufacturing’s water use is projected to rise from 58,602 acre-feet in 2030 to 71,293 acre-feet (or 4,750 times the volume of Barton Springs) in 2080.
Those projections preceded the recent spike in applications to plug almost 250 data centers into the state’s electric grid to power the artificial intelligence boom, adding to the hundreds of facilities already in operation in Texas.
All current data centers connected to Texas’ main electric grid could cumulatively consume eight gigawatts of electricity at a time, according to Cook. Driven overwhelmingly by data centers, that grid currently has requests for 474 gigawatts waiting in the queue, according to a memo from the Office of Gov. Greg Abbott. That’s more than five times the state’s all-time peak energy use of 90 gigawatts.
Thirsty data centers
Hyperscale data centers running more than 5,000 servers require massive amounts of water — directly and indirectly. The huge amounts of electricity needed to run data centers generate enough heat to overload the servers if not cooled properly. As a result, most data centers rely on water-based cooling systems to stay online. Most also run on electricity from fossil-fuel-based power plants that also use water for cooling.
Most hyperscale data centers use between 100 megawatts and 300 megawatts, which requires between 190,000 gallons and 570,000 gallons of water per day based on estimates from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That’s equal to the daily water use of between 475 and 1,425 homes.
Efficient closed-loop systems continuously recycle the water used for cooling. However those systems, which consume less water, cost more and use more electricity, Cook said. With current technologies, data centers face trade-offs between water or power use. One or the other.
The impact of Abbott’s temporary pause on that data center build-out “depends on how long that pause is in effect,” Cook said. She added that while Abbott’s directive lacks the enforcement teeth of a state law, major artificial intelligence companies (such as Google, Amazon and OpenAI) have announced that they will follow the directive.
Even if the data center build-out does not come to fruition as expected, the state is still staring down a water supply gap.
“Without data centers, we would still have (water) shortages,” Cook said, adding that the state will have to invest heavily in new utility infrastructure to meet demand.
“The price tag to get to that point of having enough water supply available by 2080 is about $174 billion.”
Coming Wednesday: The second and final part of this series explores future water supply strategies.
This story has been updated to accurately reflect the average annual water use of a U.S. household.
Piper Guinn is the health equity reporter for the Austin Free Press, covering the disproportionate health burden carried by our city’s most vulnerable. Piper is a native Texan and recent graduate of Whittier College, where she received a B.A. in political science.
Support for Austin Free Press reporting on government accountability and watchdog reporting comes from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation. Sponsors do not influence AFP’s editorial decisions.
