Data centers and water
Data Center Water Use in Travis County, TX
Travis County, Texas has 17 mapped data center facilities, including Meta, carrying about 425 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.
Moderate water pressure
Travis County has no health violations in the last 5 years, extreme drought, low existing industrial water demand.
- Mapped facilities
- 17
- EPA + OpenStreetMap layers
- Estimated power load
- 425 MW
- IM3 Atlas capacity estimate
- Permitted discharge
- Not reported
- Clean Water Act permit fields
- DCWSI national rank
- #54
- of 318 scored counties
The operators
How many data centers are in Travis County?
17 facilities are mapped to Travis County, Texas across the EPA and OpenStreetMap layers, run by operators including Meta. Counts reflect mapped footprint, not an operator's total fleet.
- OpenStreetMap
Alpheus DataCenter
Alpheus · Austin, TX
- OpenStreetMap
Cortex supercomputer
48
- OpenStreetMap
CyrusOne Austin Data Center II
CyrusOne · 48
- OpenStreetMap
CyrusOne Austin Data Center III
CyrusOne · 48
- OpenStreetMap
Data Foundry - Texas 1
Austin, TX
- OpenStreetMap
Data Foundry - Texas 2
Austin, TX
- OpenStreetMap
Data Foundry Austin 1 Data Center
48
- OpenStreetMap
Digital Realty Austin AUS11
Digital Realty · Austin, TX
- OpenStreetMap
Element Critical
48
- OpenStreetMap
LightEdge Austin I
48
- OpenStreetMap
LightEdge Austin II
Austin, TX
- OpenStreetMap
Lumen Austin 1
48
- OpenStreetMap
Lumen Austin 3
Lumen Technologies · 48
- EPA ECHO
META ATX9025
Meta · PFLUGERVILLE, TX
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 713411278
48
- OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap data center 713411279
48
- OpenStreetMap
Thin-nology
Pflugerville, TX
Supply versus demand
How much water do Travis 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 Travis County. The figures below show the county's industrial water baseline for context.
- Mapped facility discharge
- Not reported
- County industrial baseline
- 3.49 Mgal/day
Model a build
Can Travis County support more data centers?
Travis County carries 32 on the water-pressure scale, so new large-load demand warrants closer scrutiny. 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 Travis County.
Your facility would use 22.9% of this county's industrial water baseline. Verify water rights and long-term drought projections before committing.
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 Travis County compare nationally?
- DCWSI build-out rank
- #54
- of 318 counties with a stress score
- Water pressure vs median
- +13
- national median is 19 of 100
- Share of mapped load
- 0.3%
- of 166.02 GW mapped nationally
Travis 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.