Data centers and water
Data Center Water Use in Harris County, TX
Harris County, Texas has 6 mapped data center facilities, including DXC Technology, Skybox, carrying about 240 MW of estimated power load.
Water pressure for new demandHow hard a large new water user, like a data center, would press on this county's water. It blends recent drinking-water compliance, drought, and existing industrial demand. Higher pressure means new demand competes harder with current uses. It is not a judgment about whether one should be built.
Low water pressure
Harris County has no health violations in the last 5 years, severe drought, high existing industrial water demand baseline.
- Mapped facilities
- 6
- EPA + OpenStreetMap layers
- Estimated power load
- 240 MW
- IM3 Atlas capacity estimate
- Permitted discharge
- Not reported
- Clean Water Act permit fields
- DCWSI national rank
- #69
- of 318 scored counties
The operators
How many data centers are in Harris County?
6 facilities are mapped to Harris County, Texas across the EPA and OpenStreetMap layers, run by operators including DXC Technology, Skybox. Counts reflect mapped footprint, not an operator's total fleet.
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 487170215
DXC Technology · 48
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 543316327
DXC Technology · 48
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 543404966
DXC Technology · 48
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 587103676
48
- OpenStreetMap
Rice Data Center
Houston, TX
- OpenStreetMap
Skybox Houston One
Skybox · 48
Supply versus demand
How much water do Harris County data centers use?
Exact facility water draw is rarely public. As a screening proxy we compare the Clean Water Act permitted discharge mapped to these facilities against the county's entire industrial water baseline from the USGS 2020 series.
No Clean Water Act permitted discharge is reported for the mapped facilities in Harris County. The figures below show the county's industrial water baseline for context.
- Mapped facility discharge
- Not reported
- County industrial baseline
- 54.7 Mgal/day
Model a build
Can Harris County support more data centers?
On the water-pressure scale, Harris County sits at 23, below the national median, so new large-load demand has more slack here than in most counties. Size a hypothetical build to see the daily draw against the county industrial baseline.
Data Center Water Budget Calculator
Estimate daily water use for a hypothetical facility in Harris County.
Your facility would use 1.5% of this county's existing industrial water baseline — well within sustainable range.
Based on USGS 2020 water-use data and EPA-standard cooling intensity constants. Not a substitute for site-specific water rights analysis.
In context
How does Harris County compare nationally?
- DCWSI build-out rank
- #69
- of 318 counties with a stress score
- Water pressure vs median
- +4
- national median is 19 of 100
- Share of mapped load
- 0.1%
- of 166.02 GW mapped nationally
Harris County is one of 330 US counties with mapped data centers. See the full ranking and the interactive map in the national atlas.
Facility data combines EPA ECHO, EPA Clean Water Act permits, OpenStreetMap, and the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (DOE/PNNL), geocoded to county FIPS. Capacity and water baselines come from IM3 and USGS 2020 water-use data. These are county-level screening figures, not a facility-level water-use audit. Read the full methodology.