What is reclaimed water?

Treated wastewater delivered through a separate purple pipeline for non-drinking uses such as irrigation and industrial cooling. Using it can take a large cooling load off the drinking-water system.

Water

Will a data center raise my water bill?

Q: Will a data center raise my water bill?

It depends which water it uses. A dry-cooled or closed-loop plant may consume almost no water; an evaporative plant on potable supply can consume a lot. Reclaimed water on the purple pipe is a third case.

It depends which water, which plant, and who is already on the purple pipe. Do not cherry-pick a cooling tower in Virginia and a dry cooler in Texas into one sentence.

Heat rejectionWater source

Estimate

833thousand gal / year

Screening range for a 5 MW IT hall: 93–4,270k gal. Not a SAWS bill.

Drinking water

SAWS briefing: around 0.1% of potable use today. Future requests were described in acre-feet, not in household rate coupons.

Recycled water

75% of data-center water in 2025, per SAWS. Headroom on the purple pipe is finite. Power plants already take a large recycled allocation.

What you cannot see

Account-level gallons after smart meters are withheld under Texas Government Code §552.1331. If you want numbers, write reporting into the agreement.

Architecture first: cooling explorer. Then change the assumptions.

Data last checked 2026-09-04 · Current public data is a snapshot, not a live meter

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