Big Tech is lying to you

They reap the rewards. We pay the bills.

To my friends — I know it’s been a while since I posted on Substack. I’ve been trying to figure out how to use my Substack during the campaign. I think it’ll be used for stories from the campaign + in-depth investigations on the issues facing Texas. We’re planning to start posting on Substack on Sundays. To learn more about my campaign, click here.

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The current TX political establishment is like my goat Tweedledumb, who thinks coyotes can be their friend.

The establishment, monopolized by the TX GOP for the last 30 years, is mindlessly luring a bunch of huge new data centers to feed the frenzy around artificial intelligence (AI), bitcoin mining, and cloud computing. They think Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI (whom I will refer to as Big Tech) are their “friends.”

Let me be clear: thinking that Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Thiel, and Ellison are going to do anything to help our country instead of just enriching themselves is like inviting a coyote inside your house.

The TL;DR (too long, didn’t read)

1. Data centers cause electricity prices to rise by 70% in some cases.

2. Data centers contribute to rising water prices as the supply is restricted / wells start running dry.

3. Not a good use of jobs. Modernizing our infrastructure is a better use of our talent.

4. Don’t put waterhogs in arid areas.

5. The Ag Commissioner can stop, or at least delay, Big Tech from causing water/power inflation.

Power bill inflation

Cassandra at first didn’t mind all of the new data centers coming to her area. Until, that is, she saw her electric bill jump by 70%. This inflation didn’t happen because she used more power—she actually used less—but because Big Tech’s new data centers in her area caused inflation.

Data centers must be kept cool at all times. This reduces the supply of power and overloads infrastructure, forcing prices to rise—not for Big Tech, which receives all the subsidies it can ask for, but for everyday working people.

Maybe you think that, because you don’t live near a data center, you’ll be immune to this inflation? Hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but we’re all in this boat together. You don’t have to live right next to a data center to feel the power squeeze.

These centers will likely result in higher power bills for all Texans.

Water bill inflation

The massive computers in these AI centers generate a lot of heat, which requires water for cooling. They, in short, are waterhogs. This will lessen supply, which will lead to inflation.

Each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water. Billions of AI users worldwide enter prompts into systems like ChatGPT every minute. Multiply that by minutes in a year, and you have an idea of the huge sucking sound as AI pulls from our aquifers and reservoirs.

Some of these giant AI corporations promise water neutrality, but trusting them is like trusting an addict to drug test themselves.

An estimated 80% use an evaporative cooling system, in which the center’s heat is absorbed by water. The heat is then removed from the water through evaporation, causing the water to be lost as vapor in the air. The winds can carry the moisture thousands of miles away. The remaining 20 percent is “recycled”.

Adding insult to injury, the remaining water is saltier and contaminated with chemicals after four or five cycles, making it difficult to reuse and further increasing the demand for fresh water. Many city wastewater treatment plants weren’t designed to identify and remove these toxins.

Some AI companies can point to their use of closed-loop liquid systems to cool the servers in data centers. The systems can recycle water or use a non-conductive dielectric fluid (whatever that is, and I doubt it is suitable for anyone to drink). The closed-loop dramatically reduces or may possibly eliminate water consumption. However, it’s currently only available for certain servers, not the entire center.

Other data centers, such as the Amarillo AI data center project, do not promise water neutrality. They haven’t even promised to track it. In a recent survey, just 10% of data center managers say they track water usage across all their sites.

The average, mid-sized data center uses 300,000 gallons of water a day, roughly the use of a thousand homes. Larger data centers might use 4.5 million gallons a day, depending on their type of water cooling system. Austin has 47 such data centers, while the Dallas-Fort Worth area hosts the majority in Texas at 189. More Al data are planned, including Abilene, the site of the Stargate Project and a major Crusoe Al facility; and Shackelford County, the location of Vantage Data Centers' massive "Frontier" campus. Cities like Lubbock and Midland-Odessa are also being evaluated for future Al projects.

Our State Water Plan, which serves as the basis for Water Development Board funding, completely overlooks the water needs of data centers. If elected Ag Commissioner, I will use the Ag Department’s role in the State Water Plan to ensure that the impact of these centers on agriculture is included in the 2027 report. I will ask these hard questions at the regional planning groups and publish the results. Our communities deserve transparent reporting on how their resources are being used. Water-scarce cities in other states have already taken steps to limit the water-cooling capabilities for data centers within their jurisdictions. Texas should be leading this effort.

In a white paper to be released this month, HARC estimates that data centers in Texas will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025. They also project that by 2030, that number could rise to 399 billion gallons, or 6.6% of total water use in Texas. This water loss is significant, even after the devastating flooding earlier this month, as nearly a quarter of the state remains in drought conditions.

We need a true water solution before opening these centers.

Not the right kind of jobs

Data centers can be good for construction workers in the short term, but they don’t generate economic development that will spur further construction. Few jobs are offered inside the plant, and what jobs may exist in the plant, those folks won’t likely come from the local community but rather from elsewhere.

In Abilene, Texas, some 1,500 people are employed in building the first data center for the Stargate artificial-intelligence venture led by OpenAI. Once it is completed, there will be a lot fewer people working there. The facility is expected to employ approximately 100 full-time workers, according to the city’s economic development agency. That total is a fraction of the number of people who might work on the same one million square feet if it were an office park, factory, or warehouse. For example, Great Lakes Cheese Company broke ground on a 286,500-square-foot cheese-packaging plant in Abilene in 2021, and that is projected to employ 500 people upon opening this year.

While I know there’s something to be said about the importance of short-term jobs that will help our brothers and sisters in the construction/linemen industries, it would be better for their skills to be employed to build infrastructure that would lower the cost of living—not jobs that cause inflation.

Don’t put waterhogs in arid places

I want these centers in the USA—ideally, they would even be in Texas. We must not offshore this industry. But do we really need waterhogs in arid areas?

While I certainly understand the appeal, I fear we may be throwing our West Texas kids and grandkids under the bus to appease Big Tech.

West Texas, and specifically Amarillo, will be the site of the world's largest data center. Fermi America is developing a large nuclear-powered campus with Texas Tech to create an 11-gigawatt HyperGrid AI campus to power it.

11 gigawatts is like building 11 San Franciscos next to Amarillo. 11 gigawatts is greater than the output of your average nuclear power plant, so they plan to build maybe 2 commercial nuclear power plants and maybe 4 small modular nuclear plants. Details are unclear, and they don’t have permits for small, modular, mid-size, or full nuclear plants. All of this is planned to be situated near the Pantex plant. Even if they build new nuclear plants, that’s a 10-year process—whereas these data centers are a 2-3 year process.

Impact on county revenue

Big Tech is trying to “bribe” local county governments to ok their projects. In July 2025, Shackelford County Commissioners approved a tax abatement deal for the Vantage data center project. Shackelford County Commissioners gave unanimous approval for a ten-year tax abatement arrangement in which Vantage will make $10 million in annual payments to the county in lieu of property taxes.

Let me ask you: who do you *honestly* believe is getting the better deal here?

Conclusion

It’s a common story. A faceless corporation (owned by billionaires, Wall Street, or others) moves to an area, builds a facility, runs everything to the ground in 20 years, then moves to the next location—leaving the locals to deal with the damage. Big Ag, especially Big Dairy, is infamous for doing this. We cannot allow Big Tech to join in. We need responsible growth.

If I were the Texas Ag Commissioner, I would demand an Agriculture Impact Study for each new data center. Big Tech cannot have all the rewards while locals take all the risk. We will not allow Big Tech to drive out generational family farms or cause significant inflation — not without a fight.

While we want these centers somewhere in the USA, we do not want Big Tech to reap the rewards while we take the risks (& pay all the bills). We do not want them to make living even more unaffordable for everyday Texans by jacking up our power bills and using all of our water. We’re not going to throw our folks under the bus to appease Big Tech or Wall Street.

We can’t be a Tweedledumb about this. We don’t want us sticking our heads through a fence, thinking the grass is greener on the other side, only to find out the other side is just gravel, after Big Tech used up all the water, and we now have our heads stuck in the fence.

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Notes and References:

1. Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271

Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities (Google. Environmental report. https://sustainability.google/reports/, 2024.)

2. 2021 survey by the New York City-based Uptime Institute that found that only 51% of data center operators track their water usage, and even those that do monitor it, do so mostly at individual sites. Only 10% track water use across all their facilities. Uptime is an advisory organization that certifies digital infrastructure performance standards for data centers around the world. More than 60% say there is no “business justification” to collect that information, according to the Uptime survey. https://uptimeinstitute.com/resources/research-and-reports/2021-data-center-industry-survey-results

3. According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water (or 519 milliliters). This may not sound like much, but billions of AI users worldwide enter prompts into systems like ChatGPT every minute. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

4. Texas Is Still in Drought, and AI Data Centers Are Quietly Guzzling Up Water

Texas continues to attract AI giants, despite resource strain Austin Chronicle, By Sammie Seamon, Fri., July 25, 2025. https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2025-07-25/texas-is-still-in-drought-and-ai-data-centers-are-quietly-guzzling-up-water/