Google plans new Texas data centre with ‘Advanced Air Cooling’ amid water use concerns

Google

• Google's new Texas data centre will use advanced air-cooling
• Facility aims to limit fresh water use to critical campus needs
• Google claims its expansion will strengthen Texas' power grid

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Google is building yet another data centre campus in Texas, and this time the company is keen to emphasise what it will not be using: vast quantities of fresh water.

The new facility, part of Google’s previously announced two-year $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State, will rely on what the company describes as “advanced air-cooling technology”. According to Google, water consumption will be limited to “critical campus operations” such as kitchens, rather than large-scale cooling systems typically associated with hyperscale data centres.

The announcement arrives at a sensitive moment. Across the US, local communities are increasingly pushing back against the rapid construction of data centres. Residents and environmental groups argue that these facilities strain local power grids, drive up electricity prices and consume enormous amounts of water, particularly in drought-prone regions. Critics also point to the broader climate impact, as the AI boom fuels demand for energy-hungry computing infrastructure.

Google says its Texas expansion will help strengthen the grid rather than burden it. The company claims to have contracted for 7,800 megawatts of net energy generation and capacity to be added to the state’s power network. Whether that offsets rising demand from AI workloads remains a matter of debate.

Not everyone accepts the environmental critique. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, has dismissed concerns about water usage as “fake”, arguing that training AI models is often compared unfairly to human resource consumption. His comments have sparked fresh discussion about transparency and metrics in AI infrastructure reporting.

Meanwhile, some tech leaders, including Elon Musk of Tesla, have floated more radical ideas such as building data centres in space to bypass terrestrial environmental constraints. Experts, however, warn that launching and maintaining such infrastructure could create its own environmental footprint, potentially compounding rather than solving the problem.