The Black Box 005: Texas Sealed the Water Records of 36 Data Centers Under a Law Written to Stop Payday Lenders
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A privacy statute meant to protect families' smart meter data is now the reason no one can see how much water Texas data centers drink.
The Black Box 005: Texas Sealed the Water Records of 36 Data Centers Under a Law Written to Stop Payday Lenders
A privacy statute meant to protect families' smart meter data is now the reason no one can see how much water Texas data centers drink.
August 14, 2026
Bolted to the wall of nearly every building the San Antonio Water System serves is a meter that reads itself. No meter reader walks the route anymore. The device samples usage at regular intervals and transmits the numbers home over a radio network, a system the industry calls advanced metering infrastructure, installed so that billing would be accurate and disputes would be rare.
In July, those meters became the legal reason the public cannot learn how much water the region's data centers consume.
The reporters at KSAT, San Antonio's ABC affiliate, wanted to know. Investigative reporter Daniela Ibarra filed a public information request with SAWS seeking three years of water usage records for the data centers operating in Bexar County. The utility declined to release anything recorded after its smart meters came online, which covers roughly everything since 2023.
The number of data centers in the request was 36.
The number of usage records released for them was zero.
What was actually built
The provision SAWS relied on is Section 552.1331 of the Texas Government Code, added by House Bill 872 in 2021. Its author is State Representative Diego Bernal, a San Antonio Democrat.
The section is short. It defines an advanced metering system as any utility metering system that collects data at regular intervals through an automated wireless or radio network. It defines a government-operated utility by reference to the Utilities Code. It then excepts from the Texas Public Information Act any information such a utility maintains that is collected through such a system for usage, services, and billing, including "amounts billed or collected for utility usage," along with information revealing whether an account is delinquent or facing disconnection.
One carve-out follows: the utility must disclose the information to the customer it describes, or the customer's representative.
Read the section's text start to finish and certain words never appear. Residential is not there. Household is not there. Commercial is not there. The statute draws no line between a two-bedroom house on the South Side and a hyperscale computing facility, because it does not classify customers at all. Whatever flows through a smart meter is covered.
That silence sat quietly for years. Then, in February 2026, it was tested. A television station in Corpus Christi, KRIS 6, requested the city's water billing records for a chain of car washes expanding through town during a historic drought, and the Texas Attorney General ruled the city could keep the records secret because the data came through an advanced metering system. SAWS's spokesperson, Anne Hayden, described that ruling in a written statement as a formal opinion that the provision applies to commercial accounts, and said the utility is abiding by it.
Five months later, the same reasoning sealed the water bills of every data center in Bexar County.
The innocent reading, at full strength
There is a version of this story in which nothing went wrong.
The Attorney General's office rules on statutory text, not on what a legislator remembers intending. The text contains no commercial exclusion, so a ruling that covers commercial accounts is a straightforward reading, arguably the only defensible one. Interval meter data is also genuinely sensitive. For a household it can show when the occupants are home. For a business it can reveal operating patterns, shift schedules, and production rhythms that a competitor would pay for. A utility lawyer who withholds it is not scheming; she is following the plain words of the law and the state's controlling interpretation of them.
The industry adds that the underlying alarm is overstated. Inside Climate News reported in April that, according to a developer and the Data Center Coalition, only about 20 percent of the large data center capacity operating in Texas uses evaporative cooling, and that in water-stressed areas the industry says it often uses less water than other manufacturers.
Both points deserve to be stated plainly, because the record that follows does not depend on rejecting them.
Why the second reading holds anyway
The strongest witness against the innocent reading is the man who wrote the law.
Bernal told KSAT the statute was meant to protect individuals' and families' usage data from payday lenders, not to hide corporate consumption. Asked directly whether SAWS is interpreting his bill the way he meant it, he answered: "Absolutely not." He also said existing law gives utilities the ability to fix the problem, which is worth holding next to Hayden's statement that the Attorney General's opinion prohibits disclosure. One of them describes a choice. The other describes a command. The distance between those two characterizations of the same ruling is itself part of the record, and we could not resolve it, because the ruling document is not published alongside the news accounts and we did not obtain it.
The reach of the interpretation is also widening case by case, and each case is bigger than the last. February was car washes. By June, the Texas Observer reported that Corpus Christi was refusing to release the 2026 water records of a cryptocurrency mine that had consumed more than 11 million gallons the previous year, a figure the city had been willing to disclose in 2025. The city cited a section of the Utilities Code covering individual customer accounts, and appealed the Observer's request to the Attorney General. July was 36 data centers. The pattern is not a fixed set of secrets. It is a precedent looking for its next application.
And the state's other instrument for learning the same information has already returned nothing. At a legislative hearing in June, lawmakers were told that fewer than one-third of data center companies had responded to a state survey asking them to voluntarily report their water use. Republican State Representative Cody Harris of Palestine told the hearing that transparency about resource use ought not be left optional. So the voluntary channel produced mostly silence, and the compulsory channel, the Public Information Act, is closed by a privacy statute. A resident of Cibolo or San Antonio who wants the number has no third channel.
What the sealed records sit on top of
This would matter less in a wet state.
Corpus Christi's water crisis has made national headlines, with projections that demand could exceed supply as early as next summer, and the city preparing for an emergency declaration that would bring tighter restrictions and penalties. Residents in that scenario are policed against their own usage data. The region's large industrial users are the accounts the public cannot see. When Corpus Christi council member Sylvia Campos learned her own city was withholding the cryptomine's records, her reaction, as the Observer reported it, was blunt: "This is public information. This is water."
The demand curve ahead is steep. A white paper by University of Texas at Austin researchers projects data centers could account for 3 to 9 percent of Texas water use by 2040. The buildout generating that curve is arriving in towns that learn about it late. In Cibolo, a 243,000-square-foot facility is planned on 39 acres; a nearby resident, Davin Hicks, started a petition against it and said neighbors had no idea it was coming, and a city council member said she learned the project had been approved from a news article. San Marcos banned data centers outright in June.
A community weighing whether to accept one of these facilities has exactly one relevant empirical question about water, which is how much the existing ones use. That is the question the statute now prevents any Texas city utility from answering.
The tell
The people closest to the mechanism are already behaving as if it failed.
Bernal told KSAT the records dispute constitutes fair warning that the law has to be fixed. A Republican colleague used a transparency hearing to say disclosure should not be optional. And other states are legislating directly at this gap. Virginia adopted rules taking effect in January that force waterworks operators to categorize data center water sales in their reporting, while still protecting facility-level figures as trade secrets. In Georgia, legislators introduced a bill to bar local governments from signing nondisclosure agreements that keep utility usage data secret, after a public records request there returned documents with the water figures redacted. Statutes written this year are being drafted around the assumption that, left alone, the numbers stay hidden. That assumption is the concession.
The record, stated cleanly
What the documents establish: the full text of Section 552.1331 and its definitions, which contain no distinction between residential and commercial accounts; that SAWS denied a request for the smart-meter water records of 36 Bexar County data centers and cited the statute and a February 2026 Attorney General ruling as its basis; that the statute's author states the interpretation contradicts his intent; that fewer than one-third of data center companies answered the state's voluntary water survey, as reported from a June legislative hearing; and that a Corpus Christi cryptomine consumed more than 11 million gallons in a year in which its records were still public.
What they do not establish: how much water any Bexar County data center actually uses, which is precisely the sealed fact; the full text and reasoning of the February ruling, which we did not obtain; whether a utility could lawfully release the records voluntarily, a point on which the bill's author and the utility's statement point in opposite directions; and whether data center usage in the region is large or small relative to other industrial customers. Anyone asserting that last point, in either direction, is asserting something the current record cannot support.
Texas built the most granular water measurement system in its history, a meter on every wall reporting every interval of every day. Then it ruled that the only party entitled to read a company's numbers is the company.
Sources: House Bill 872, 87th Texas Legislature, enrolled text, via capitol.texas.gov; Texas Government Code Sec. 552.1331; Daniela Ibarra and Eddie Latigo, KSAT Investigates, July 28, 2026; KRIS 6 News, Corpus Christi, February 2026; Dylan Baddour, Texas Observer, June 25, 2026; Inside Climate News, April 10, 2026; VPM News, June 25, 2026; MultiState legislative tracking, March 2026.