Desalination and Industrial Runoff Could Ease Data Center Water Demands, UT Austin Study Finds

Data center operators facing mounting regulatory scrutiny over utility consumption could cool facilities using industrial wastewater and brackish groundwater rather than municipal drinking water, according to research covered by TechXplore (https://techxplore.com/news/2026-10-salty-dirty-cool-centers-desalination.html).

The study, led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and published in the journal Water Research, evaluated how commercial water treatment methods can help facilities repurpose contaminated or high-salinity fluids. The team assessed two primary separation techniques: membrane-based reverse osmosis, which operates efficiently on moderate salinity, and thermal separation, which uses heat to vaporize highly saline water but requires substantially more power and risks equipment scaling.

Even with thermal methods, the researchers found that water treatment consumes only a small fraction of a data center's total energy footprint. Vaibhav Bahadur, a professor in UT Austin's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and co-lead author of the paper, noted that operators do not need novel breakthroughs to mitigate water use, because existing commercial systems can address the issue today at manageable operating costs.

The findings suggest an operational bridge between digital infrastructure and the energy sector, particularly in Texas. The Permian Basin produces approximately 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools of byproduct water daily during oil and gas extraction. Energy operators typically haul this fluid over long distances for underground injection—a disposal method associated with seismic activity and constrained by subsurface storage capacity that could be exhausted as early as 2030.

The proposal coincides with increased official scrutiny of server infrastructure in Texas. In September, Governor Greg Abbott paused new data center permits to evaluate their community impacts, while the Texas attorney general's office initiated an inquiry into water consumption at existing sites.

To assess local hydrological impact, the researchers created a metric called saline water utilization intensity (SWUI). Modeling three deployment scenarios, the authors found that a hypothetical facility in Longview, Texas, recorded the lowest water stress by using a two-stage reverse osmosis system on brackish groundwater, delivering high freshwater recovery with low energy requirements.

The research feeds into software being developed by the COMPASS consortium at UT Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology, designed to help regulators model individual data center proposals before issuing permits. Bahadur and COMPASS chief economist Ning Lin recently presented the research to the Texas Senate Committee on Water, Agriculture, and Rural Affairs, advocating for standardized water and power data in local development decisions.