Water
San Angelo is a West Texas city on the edge of its own supply. It has been through a water crisis before. The Mayor justified moving fast on a 1.2‑gigawatt data center partly by pointing at a $400 million water treatment plant the city needs. So the water question is not a side issue in that deal — it is the deal.
Where the water comes from
| Source | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| O.H. Ivie Reservoir | Surface | The chief surface source for meeting daily demand. |
| Twin Buttes Reservoir | Surface | Part of the city's surface supply system. |
| Concho River | Surface | Local surface water. |
| Hickory Aquifer | Groundwater | Piped in from McCulloch County. Allocation rises to 10,000 acre-feet/yr in 2026 and 12,000 by 2036. Operating strategy draws about 1.5 MGD as a required minimum. |
With roughly 41 months of supply, the City is in standard conservation: outside watering restricted to twice every seven days, no more than one inch per week. Those are the rules residents live under right now, before a single data center building exists.
The $400 million plant
Missing a timeline “may cost all of us lots of money.” Mayor Tom Thompson, defending the compressed data center timeline while citing $400 million needed for a new water treatment plant — SanAngeloLive, Dec. 31, 2025
This is the clearest statement of the city's actual logic: San Angelo needs an enormous capital investment in water infrastructure, and a $21–22 billion taxable facility is how the city hopes to pay for it. That is a coherent argument, and it deserves to be evaluated on the numbers rather than on vibes.
Evaluating it requires three things the public does not currently have: the executed Chapter 380 agreement, a projection of campus water demand at full build-out, and the financing plan for the treatment plant showing which revenue actually retires which debt, in which years. We have records requests drafted for all three.
How the data center rules interact with the supply
The June 16, 2026 water ordinance (adopted 7–0) sets these limits on any data center:
| Requirement | Limit | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Cooling type | Closed-loop only; no evaporative cooling | This is the meaningful win. Evaporative cooling is what makes data centers water-hungry. |
| Initial fill | 8.0 gal / sq ft of gross building area | Scales with building size, which the ordinance does not cap in total. |
| Fill window | Within 12 months of certificate of occupancy | Phased buildings mean repeated fills across the build-out. |
| Annual makeup | 3% of loop volume per building | Percentage of a volume that itself grows with each building. |
| Drain and refill | No more than every 3 years | Each refill is effectively another initial fill. |
| Metering | Cooling water metered separately | Good. Makes verification possible — if the readings are released. |
| Source | City municipal system, not on-site wells | Means the campus competes with residents, not with itself. |
| Chemicals | Food-grade propylene glycol anticipated; no PFAS “added or allowed” | Enforcement and testing regime not specified publicly. |
Mandating closed-loop cooling and banning evaporative cooling is genuinely the strongest water protection available to a city in this position, and San Angelo adopted it unanimously. The criticism here is about sequence — the zoning was locked in five months before any of these rules existed — and about the absence of a published total-demand projection. It is not a claim that the ordinance is meaningless.
Has this happened before?
Yes. San Angelo has faced repeated water scarcity, and local reporting has asked directly whether another crisis is coming. The Hickory Aquifer pipeline itself was built as a response to that exposure — a multi-phase project stretching back over a decade.