Abbott Orders Texas Water Board to Penalize Data Centers Over Water-Use Reporting Failures

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told the Texas Water Development Board on Monday, September 14, 2026, to start enforcing water-reporting laws against data centers, which the agency has largely let slide for years.

In a letter to TWDB Chairwoman L'Oreal Stepney and Executive Administrator Bryan McMath, Abbott wrote that major water users, including data centers, "appear to have committed civil and criminal violations" by failing to submit required water-use surveys under the Texas Water Code. He ordered the board to use its enforcement authority, refer violations to county or district attorneys, and notify the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality so noncompliant facilities can lose eligibility for permits.

"Data centers must share the duty to protect Texas water," Abbott said in a statement. "The Texas Water Code requires a complete and accurate water use survey."

The compliance numbers don't fully agree, but they're both bad

The Texas Tribune and Click2Houston reported that as few as 28% of data centers have responded to the state-mandated survey over the last three years. Texas Scorecard, citing separate sourcing, put noncompliance for the Calendar Year 2025 survey specifically at roughly 80%, with responses due March 1. Those are different measurement windows, not necessarily contradictory, but either way most data centers in Texas are not filling out a form the state has required since 2020.

Failing to complete the survey is a Class C misdemeanor under state law. But TWDB told the Tribune it doesn't have prosecutorial authority because it's a non-regulatory agency, and it doesn't even track how many fines have been issued. Enforcement, the board says, lies with local district attorneys and law enforcement. That's the gap Abbott's directive is aimed at closing: he wants TWDB to actually refer cases rather than shrug.

This builds on an August 3, 2026 order from Abbott directing the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to audit every data center trying to connect to the state grid. That audit covers water consumption, water sourcing, on-site power generation, and community impact. Projects that don't complete it get denied grid interconnection. ERCOT was reportedly weighing about 474 gigawatts of connection requests, more than five times the state's peak demand record, with data centers behind roughly 90% of that, according to figures cited by Texas Scorecard.

Abbott's campaign press secretary, Eduardo Leal, told the Daily Signal the governor's goal is to make sure data centers "do not take water needed by communities or power needed by the Texas grid" and "pay for their own electricity infrastructure," adding that Abbott wants to eliminate data center sales tax breaks and codify these standards into law.

The scale driving this is real. Texas has 335 data centers with at least 248 more in the pipeline, according to Pew Research Center figures cited by the Guardian and Superpower Daily. The Houston Advanced Research Center estimates Texas data centers used 25 billion gallons of water in 2025, a figure it projects could hit 161 billion gallons by 2030, about 2.7% of all water used in the state.

Abbott's Democratic challenger, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, argues the governor created this mess by signing laws that gave data centers tax breaks in the first place, according to the Daily Signal. That's a fair criticism to raise given Abbott's now positioning himself as the enforcer.

But Hinojosa's own record complicates the attack. In her first year in the Legislature, she voted for House Bill 4038, which redefined "qualifying job" under the tax code in a way that helped data centers access the state's sales-tax exemption program, the Daily Signal reported. Neither candidate arrives at this fight with clean hands on the tax-break question.

Republicans aren't uniformly behind the AI buildout either. Texas State Sen. Charles Schwertner has raised property-rights concerns after a July hearing on landowner complaints, the Daily Wire reported. Oklahoma State Senator Kendal Sacchieri is pushing a three-year statewide moratorium on new data centers. GOP candidates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Texas's own attorney general race have signaled similar opposition. That runs against the Trump administration's stance: the president hosted an event in July where more than 200 utilities, tech companies, and governors, Abbott among them, signed a "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" meant to let data centers keep expanding as long as they bring their own energy.

A reasonable industry objection here is that stacking a water-survey crackdown on top of a separate ERCOT interconnection audit creates two overlapping compliance regimes for the same underlying information, adding cost and delay to projects the federal government wants built faster. Nothing in the record shows Abbott's office has addressed that overlap directly, beyond directing TWDB and ERCOT to coordinate.

The board has until October 14, 2026, to report back to Abbott's office on enforcement progress, with further updates required once the grid audit wraps. Whether that produces actual misdemeanor referrals and permit denials, or another round of unenforced paperwork, is the open question hanging over both the water fight and the governor's race.